Mary McCarthy's Collected Memoirs: Memories of a Catholic Girlhood, How I Grew, and Intellectual Memoirs (7 page)

Nevertheless, in one sense, I
have
been unfair here to my grandmother: I show her, as it were, in retrospect, looking back at her and judging her as an adult. But as a child, I liked my grandmother, I thought her a tremendous figure. Many of her faults—her blood-curdling Catholicism, for example—were not apparent to me as faults. It gave me a thrill to hear her go on about “the Protestants” and the outrages of the Ku Klux Klan; I even liked to hear her tell about my parents’ death. In her way, “Aunt Lizzie,” as my second cousins used to call her, was a spellbinder. She spent her winters in Florida, but in the summer she would let me come in the afternoon, quite often, and sit on her shaded front porch, watching her sew and listening to her. Afterward, I was allowed to go out and give myself a ride on the turntable in her big garage—a sort of merry-go-round on which the chauffeur turned her cars, so that they never had to be backed in or out. Besides her Pierce-Arrow, for winter use, she had a Locomobile, canvas-topped, for summer, which she sometimes took me driving in, out to Minnetonka or Great Bear Lake or Winona. Once we visited an Ursuline convent, and once we went up to St. Joseph to look at St. Benedict’s Academy. On these occasions, in her motoring costume, veils, and high-crowned straw hat, she was an imposing great lady.

You felt she could be “big” when she wanted to. “My mother was
square,”
says Uncle Harry. She also had a worldly side, fancying herself as a woman of fashion and broad social horizons. One summer, she and my grandfather took me with them to a snappy resort in northern Minnesota called Breezy Point. It was run by a man named Billy Fawcett, the editor of
Captain Billy’s Whiz Bang;
there I first saw a woman smoke. On the way back, we stopped to visit my grandfather’s brother, my uncle John, just outside Duluth, where the grain-elevator company had its main offices. He had a large country house, with formal gardens and
w
alks, set in a deep forest. They showed me phosphorescent wood and fireflies; there were fairies in the garden, they said. Before going to bed, I left a note for the fairies in a rose, fully expecting an answer. But the next morning there was only dew in the rose, and I felt very troubled, for this proved to me that fairies didn’t exist.

There was a spaciousness in my grandmother’s personality that made her comfortable to be with, even though you were in awe of her. Marshall Field’s, she often related, had offered her a thousand dollars for a tapestried chair she had sewn, but she had promised the chair to Uncle Louis, so, naturally, she had had to turn down the offer. This impressed me mightily, though I wondered why she did not just make another one if she had
wanted
to sell it to Marshall Field’s. Whenever I went shopping with her, I felt that she was about to give me a present, though there was nothing, except her manner, to encourage this notion. On my way east to Vassar, she did propose buying me an electric doughnut-maker for my room. Fortunately, I refused; I later discovered that she was in the habit of deducting the presents she gave my brothers from the trust fund that had been left them. Thus her ample character was strangely touched with meanness.

I have stressed the family’s stinginess where we were concerned, the rigid double standard maintained between the two houses, yet my grandfather, according to Uncle Harry, spent $41,700 for our support between the years 1918 and 1923. During this time, the Preston family contributed $300. This peculiar discrepancy I shall have to deal with later. What interests me now is the question of where the money went. Approximately $8,200 a year was not a small sum, for those days, considering, too, that it was tax free and that nothing had to be put aside for savings or life insurance. Could some of the money really have been embezzled, as we children used to think?

With that figure before my eyes, I understand a little more than I did of my grandparents’ feelings. In view of his check stubs, my grandfather would have had every reason to assume that we children were being decently taken care of in the house he had bought for us. I do remember his surprise when he found that we were being given only those two pennies to put in the collection plate on Sundays. But he did not see us very often, and when he did, we did not complain. This seems odd, but it is true. I do not think. we ever brought our woes to our grandparents. When we finally spoke, it was to our
other
grandfather, the one we hardly knew. We were afraid of punishment, I suppose. The only form of complaint, from us, that was visible to the family was that silent running away. It was I who spent the night in a confessional and a day hiding behind the statue of Laocoön in the Art Institute. That was as far as I got, for I did not have the carfare that was needed to get me to that red brick orphan asylum. Kevin was hardier. Traveling on a transfer he had somehow acquired, he reached a
yellow
brick orphan asylum called “The Sheltering Arms” that was run by the Shriners. He did not like it as well, in spite of its name, as the red brick one, and though he peered over the wall for a long time, in the end he was afraid to go in. A householder found him crying, fed him, and eventually the Pierce-Arrow came with Uncle Louis to get him, this made the householder think Kevin a terrible fraud.

The family, I think now, must have been greatly perturbed by our running away. It meant either that we were unhappy or that we were incorrigibly bad. I had stolen a ring from the five-and-ten, and my aunt had had to march me back with it into the manager’s office. Kevin had altered his report card when the prize of a dime (no, a nickel) had been offered to the one with the highest marks, and one month I had torn and defaced mine because I was afraid to show a low mark at home. At home, threats of reform
s
chool hung over us; yet at school, paradoxically, we, or at least I (I cannot remember about Kevin), stood high in conduct. And when I went to my weekly confession, I seldom got anything but the very lightest penance—those little Our Fathers and Hail Marys were almost a disappointment to me. As my grandmother must have known, I was a favorite with the parish priests.

My present impression is that my grandparents slowly came to realize the true situation in our household and that they themselves were on the point of acting when my other grandfather intervened. Looking back, I believe my grandmother was planning to enter me in the Ursuline convent we visited, certainly, that was the hope her behavior on the trip gave rise to. No doubt, they blinded themselves as long as possible, for to admit the truth was to face up to the problem of separating us children and either putting us in schools to board (for which we were really too young) or distributing us among the family (which my aunts and uncles would probably have resisted) or letting the Protestants get some of us. That was what it always came back to, as the reader will see in the next chapter.

A Tin Butterfly

T
HE MAN WE HAD
to call Uncle Myers was no relation to us. This was a point on which we four orphan children were very firm. He had married our great-aunt Margaret shortly before the death of our parents and so became our guardian while still a benedict—not perhaps a very nice eventuality for a fat man of forty-two who has just married an old maid with a little income to find himself summoned overnight from his home in Indiana to be the hired parent of four children, all under seven years old.

When Myers and Margaret got us, my three brothers and me, we were a handful; on this there were no two opinions in the McCarthy branch of the family. The famous flu epidemic of 1918, which had stricken our little household en route from Seattle to Minneapolis and carried off our parents within a day of each other, had, like all God’s devices, a meritorious aspect, soon discovered by my grandmother McCarthy: a merciful end had been put to a regimen of spoiling and coddling, to Japanese houseboys, iced cakes, picnics, upset stomachs, diamond rings (imagine!), an ermine muff and neckpiece, furred hats and coats. My grandmother thanked her stars that Myers and her sister Margaret were available to step into the breach. Otherwise, we might have had to be separated, an idea that moistened her hooded grey eyes, or been taken over by “the Protestants”—thus she grimly designated my grandfather Preston, a respectable Seattle lawyer of New England antecedents who, she many times declared with awful emphasis, had refused to receive a Catholic priest in his house! But our Seattle grandparents, coming on to Minneapolis for the funeral, were too broken up, she perceived, by our young mother’s death to protest the McCarthy arrangements. Weeping, my Jewish grandmother (Preston, born Morganstern), still a beauty, like her lost daughter, acquiesced in the wisdom of keeping us together in the religion my mother had espoused. In my sickbed, recovering from the flu in my grandmother McCarthy’s Minneapolis house, I, the eldest and the only girl, sat up and watched the other grandmother cry, dampening her exquisite black veil. I did not know that our parents were dead or that my sobbing grandmother—whose green Seattle terraces I remembered as delightful to roll down on Sundays—had just now, downstairs in my grandmother McCarthy’s well-heated sun parlor, met the middle-aged pair who had come on from Indiana to undo her daughter’s mistakes. I was only six years old and had just started school in a Sacred Heart convent on a leafy boulevard in Seattle before the fatal November trek back east, but I was sharp enough to see that Grandmother Preston did not belong here, in this dour sickroom, and vain enough to pride myself on drawing the inference that something had gone awry.

We four children and our keepers were soon installed in the yellow house at 2427 Blaisdell Avenue that had been bought for us by my grandfather McCarthy. It was situated two blocks away from his own prosperous dwelling, with its grandfather clock, tapestries, and Italian paintings, in a block that some time before had begun to “run down.” Flanked by two-family houses, it was simply a crude box in which to stow furniture, and lives, like a warehouse; the rooms were small and brownish and for some reason dark, though I cannot think why, since the house was graced by no ornamental planting; a straight cement driveway ran up one side; in the back, there was an alley. Downstairs, there were a living room, a “den,” a dining room, a kitchen, and a lavatory; upstairs, there were four bedrooms and a bathroom. The dingy wallpaper of the rooms in which we children slept was promptly defaced by us; bored without our usual toys, we amused ourselves by making figures on the walls with our wet tongues. This was our first crime, and I remember it because the violence of the whipping we got surprised us; we had not known we were doing wrong. The splotches on the walls remained through the years to fix this first whipping and the idea of badness in our minds; they stared at us in the evenings when, still bored but mute and tamed, we learned to make shadow figures on the wall—the swan, the rabbit with its ears wiggling—to while away the time.

It was this first crime, perhaps, that set Myers in his punitive mold. He saw that it was no sinecure he had slipped into. Childless, middle-aged, he may have felt in his slow-turning mind that his inexperience had been taken advantage of by his wife’s grandiloquent sister, that the vexations outweighed the perquisites; in short, that he had been sold. This, no doubt, was how it must have really looked from where he sat—in a brown leather armchair in the den, wearing a blue work shirt, stained with sweat, open at the neck to show an undershirt and lion-blond, glinting hair on his chest. Below this were workmen’s trousers of a brownish-gray material, straining at the buttons and always gaping slightly, just below the belt, to show another glimpse of underwear, of a yellowish white. On his fat head, frequently, with its crest of bronze curly hair, were the earphones of a crystal radio set, which he sometimes, briefly, in a generous mood, fitted over the grateful ears of one of my little brothers.

A second excuse for Myers’ behavior is manifest in this description. He had to contend with Irish social snobbery, which looked upon him dispassionately from four sets of green eyes and set him down as “not a gentleman.” “My father was a gentleman and you’re not”—what I meant by these categorical words I no longer know precisely, except that my father had had a romantic temperament and was a spendthrift; but I suppose there was also included some notion of courtesy. Our family, like many Irish Catholic new-rich families, was filled with aristocratic delusions; we children were always being told that we were descended from the kings of Ireland and that we were related to General “Phil” Sheridan, a dream of my great-aunt’s. More precisely, my great-grandfather on this side had been a streetcar conductor in Chicago.

But at any rate Myers (or Meyers) Shriver (or Schreiber—the name had apparently been Americanized) was felt to be beneath us socially. Another count against him in our childish score was that he was a German, or, rather, of German descent, which made us glance at him fearfully in 1918, just after the armistice. In Minneapolis at that time, there was great prejudice among the Irish Catholics, not only against the Protestant Germans, but against all the northern bloods and their hateful Lutheran heresy. Lutheranism to us children was, first of all, a religion for servant girls and, secondly, a sort of yellow corruption associated with original sin and with Martin Luther’s tongue rotting in his mouth as God’s punishment. Bavarian Catholics, on the other hand, were singled out for a special regard; we saw them in an Early Christian light, brunette and ringleted, like the Apostles. This was due in part to the fame of Oberammergau and the Passion Play, and in part to the fact that many of the clergy in our diocese were Bavarians; all through this period I confided my sins of disobedience to a handsome, dark, young Father Elderbush. Uncle Myers, however, was a Protestant, although, being too indolent, he did not go to church; he was not one of us. And the discovery that we could take refuge from him at school, with the nuns, at church, in the sacraments, seemed to verify the ban that was on him; he was truly outside grace. Having been impressed with the idea that our religion was a sort of logical contagion, spread by holy books and good example, I could never understand why Uncle Myers, bad as he was, had not caught it; and his obduracy in remaining at home in his den on Sundays, like a somnolent brute in its lair, seemed to me to go against nature.