Mary McCarthy's Collected Memoirs: Memories of a Catholic Girlhood, How I Grew, and Intellectual Memoirs (11 page)

Kevin adds a note about Uncle Myers and ball games. With my little brothers, Uncle Myers used to stand outside the ball park until the seventh-inning stretch, when the bleachers were thrown open and anyone could come in, free. Thus they saw only the ends of ball games, as we saw only the beginnings of movies. There was a superb consistency in our life, like that of a work of art. That is why even I find it sometimes incredible. A small correction, however, is necessary: I did once see a full-length feature. It was in the church basement or school auditorium, and the name of the film was
The Seal of the Confessional.
I recall a scene in which an atheist who defied God was struck by lightning. Naturally, it was free.

About the tin butterfly episode, I must make a more serious correction or at least express a doubt. An awful suspicion occurred to me as I was reading it over the other day. I suddenly remembered that in college I had started writing a play on this subject. Could the idea that Uncle Myers put the butterfly at my place have been suggested to me by my teacher? I can almost hear her voice saying to me, excitedly: “your uncle must have done it!” (She was Mrs. Hallie Flanagan, later head of the federal theatre.) And I can visualize a stage scene, with Uncle Myers tiptoeing in and pinning the butterfly to the silence pad. After a struggle with my conscience (the first Communion again), I sent for Kevin and consulted him about my doubts. He remembers the butterfly episode itself and the terrible whipping, he remembers the scene on Uncle Louis’ screened porch when we four, reunited, talked about Uncle Myers. But he does not remember Preston’s saying that Uncle Myers put the butterfly there. Preston, consulted by long-distance telephone, does not remember either saying it or seeing it. (He cannot have been more than seven when the incident happened and would be unlikely, therefore, to have preserved such a clear and
dramatic
recollection.) It still seems to me certain that we at least discussed the butterfly affair on Uncle Louis’ porch, and I may have put forward Mrs. Flanagan’s theory, to which Preston may have agreed, warmly. He may even, says Kevin, have
thought,
for the moment, he remembered, once the idea was suggested to him. But this is all conjecture, I do not know, really, whether I took the course in Playwriting before or after the night on Uncle Louis’ porch. The most likely thing, I fear, is that I fused two memories.
Mea culpa.
The play, by the way, was never finished. I did not get beyond the first act, which was set in my grandmother’s sun parlor and showed our first meeting with our guardians. It was thinking about that meeting, obviously, that nagged me into remembering Mrs. Flanagan and the play. But who did put the butterfly by my place? It may have been Uncle Myers after all. Even if no one saw him, he remains a suspect: he had motive and opportunity. “I’ll
bet
your uncle did it!”—was that what she said?

It was fall or early winter, I wrote, when my grandfather Preston arrived from Seattle and listened to our tale. Kevin thinks it was spring. We both remember the snow. Probably he is right, for he recalls a sequel to this story that took place in summer, after I had gone and the household had been broken up. He and Preston were taken, temporarily, to stay at my grandmother McCarthy’s house. For the first time, they enjoyed the freedom of the streets; up to then, we had all been kept behind our iron fence. He and Preston borrowed a wagon from a neighbor girl named Nancy and rode up and down Blaisdell Avenue, past the house we had lived in. To their surprise, Uncle Myers was still there, sitting on the front porch with Sheridan on his lap. The two little boys rode the borrowed wagon along the sidewalk on the other side of the street, screaming names and taunts at Uncle Myers, reveling like demons in their freedom and his powerlessness to harm them; “Yah, yah, yah!” Uncle Myers made no response, he simply sat there, a passive target, with Sheridan on his knee. No doubt, all the neighbors were watching. For Kevin, as he tells it, Uncle Myers’ helplessness slowly took the pleasure out of this victory parade, he felt embarrassed for the motionless fat man and drove the wagon away.

A few days later, they went past the house again. It was empty. Something tempted them to try to get in, and they climbed through a basement window that was open. The house looked very strange, all the furniture had been removed. Suddenly, a fury seized them; they began ripping off the wallpaper—the wallpaper we had been punished for spoiling. They tore it off in strips and then they flung open the medicine cabinet. Someone had forgotten to empty it, and all the family medicines were there, together with an empty jar of Aunt Mary’s beef tea. They threw the medicine bottles at the walls, smashing them, a horrible orange color—the prevailing tone of the medicines—was splattered over everything. They were revenging themselves on the house. After they had wrecked it to the limit of their powers, they climbed out through the basement window.

When what they had done was discovered, my grandmother undertook to punish Kevin. She spanked him, in her bathroom, with her hairbrush, putting him firmly over her knee. It interested him to find that her spanking did not hurt. Prone in her grasp, he howled dutifully, but inwardly he was smiling at her efforts. He thought of Aunt Margaret’s hairbrush and Uncle Myers razor strop and felt a tenderness for my grandmother—the tenderness of experience toward innocence. That fall, he and Preston were sent to St. Benedict’s Academy, after a summer stay at Captain Billy Fawcett’s Breezy Point.

A final note on Aunt Margaret’s health regimen. I have a perfect digestion and very good health; I suppose I owe it to Aunt Margaret. It is true that we children were sick a great deal before we came to her, and no doubt she hardened us with her prunes and parsnips and no pillow and five-mile hikes. Kevin used to have two snapshots, one taken by Aunt Margaret and one by Uncle Myers; they were inscribed “Before the Five Mile Hike” and “After the Five Mile Hike.” The one showing Uncle Myers, in a cap, has mysteriously disappeared during the last year or so. My brother Preston thought he had a photo of him, but that, too, is gone. It is as if Uncle Myers himself had contrived to filch away the proof that he had existed corporeally.

One of the family photographs that has recently come to light shows the four of us children, looking very happy, with a pony on which Preston and Sheridan are sitting. We are all dressed up; I am not wearing my glasses, and my straight hair is softly curled. That pony was a stage prop. He used to be led up and down our street by an itinerant photographer, soliciting trade. The photograph, of course, was sent out west to the Preston family, who were in no position to know that this was the only time we had ever been close to a pony. It was found among my grandmother Preston’s effects.

I should have supposed that Uncle Myers and Aunt Margaret were unusual, even unique people. But I had a letter from a reader in Chicago who told me that Myers was so like his father that he was tempted to believe in reincarnation. And Aunt Margaret’s regimen was almost precisely that followed in this reader’s household fifteen years later: the same menus, with the addition of codfish balls, the same prolonged sessions on “the throne,” the same turning over of the mattress to make sure it had not been wet, the same putting away of presents on the grounds that they were “much too good.” There was the razor strop, too, and the dream of being admitted to an orphan asylum, and the threat that some other members of the family (possibly Protestants) would “make you toe the chalk line.” This man and his sister had lost only their mother, the neighbors used to feed them, too.

Even more curious was a letter from Australia from a woman of sixty, telling me that reading “Yonder Peasant” had been “probably the most uncanny experience” of her life. She and her four brothers and sisters had lost both their parents, and their childhood, she said, was an almost complete replica of mine. “Had I your gift of writing
...
I should have written long ago, and written a story that would have been disbelieved, because it would have been so unbelievable—and yet every word of it would have been starkly true. That was why I read and reread your article which ... was so like our experience
...
that it seemed I was writing and not you.”

This woman had been born a Catholic, like the man in Chicago. Her father had married a Protestant.

The Blackguard

W
ERE HE LIVING TODAY
, my Protestant grandfather would be displeased to hear that the fate of his soul had once been the occasion of intense theological anxiety with the Ladies of the Sacred Heart. While his mortal part, all unaware, went about its eighteen holes of golf, its rubber of bridge before dinner at the club, his immortal part lay in jeopardy with us, the nuns and pupils of a strict convent school set on a wooded hill quite near a piece of worthless real estate he had bought under the impression that Seattle was expanding in a northerly direction. A sermon delivered at the convent by an enthusiastic Jesuit had disclosed to us his danger. Up to this point, the disparity in religion between my grandfather and myself had given me no serious concern. The death of my parents, while it had drawn us together in many senses, including the legal one (for I became his ward), had at the same time left the gulf of a generation between us, and my grandfather’s Protestantism presented itself as a natural part of the grand, granite scenery on the other side. But the Jesuit’s sermon destroyed this ordered view in a single thunderclap of doctrine.

As the priest would have it, this honest and upright man, a great favorite with the Mother Superior, was condemned to eternal torment by the accident of having been baptized. Had he been a Mohammedan, a Jew, a pagan, or the child of civilized unbelievers, a place in Limbo would have been assured him; Cicero and Aristotle and Cyrus the Persian might have been his companions, and the harmless souls of unbaptized children might have frolicked about his feet. But if the Jesuit were right, all baptized Protestants went straight to Hell. A good life did not count in their favor. The baptismal rite, by conferring on them God’s grace, made them also liable to His organizational displeasure. That is, baptism turned them Catholic whether they liked it or not, and their persistence in the Protestant ritual was a kind of asseverated apostasy. Thus my poor grandfather, sixty years behind in his Easter duty, actually reduced his prospects of salvation every time he sat down in the Presbyterian church.

The Mother Superior’s sweet frown acknowledged me, an hour after the sermon, as I curtsied, all agitation, in her office doorway. Plainly, she had been expecting me. Madame MacIllvra, an able administrator, must have been resignedly ticking off the names of the Protestant pupils and parents all during the concluding parts of the morning’s service. She had a faint worried air, when the conversation began, of depreciating the sermon: doctrinally, perhaps, correct, it had been wanting in delicacy; the fiery Jesuit, a missionary celebrity, had lived too long among the Eskimos. This disengaged attitude encouraged me to hope. Surely this lady, the highest authority I knew, could find a way out for my grandfather. She could see that he was a special case, outside the brutal rule of thumb laid down by the Jesuit. It was she, after all, in the convent, from whom all exemptions flowed, who created arbitrary holidays (called
congés
by the order’s French tradition); it was she who permitted us to get forbidden books from the librarian and occasionally to receive letters unread by the convent censor. (As a rule, all slang expressions, violations of syntax, errors of spelling, as well as improper sentiments, were blacked out of our friends’ communications, so unless we moved in a circle of young Addisons or Burkes, the letters we longed for came to us as fragments from which the original text could only be conjectured.) To my twelve-year-old mind, it appeared probable that Madame MacIllvra, our Mother Superior, had the power to give my grandfather
congé,
and I threw myself on her sympathies.

How could it be that my grandfather, the most virtuous person I knew, whose name was a byword among his friends and colleagues for a kind of rigid and fantastic probity—how could it be that this man should be lost, while I, the object of his admonition, the despair of his example—I, who yielded to every impulse, lied, boasted, betrayed—should, by virtue of regular attendance at the sacraments and the habit of easy penitence, be saved?

Madame MacIllvra’s full white brow wrinkled; her childlike blue eyes clouded. Like many headmistresses, she loved a good cry, and she clasped me to her plump, quivering, middle-aged bosom. She understood; she was crying for my grandfather and the injustice of it too. She and my grandfather had, as a matter of fact, established a very amiable relation, in which both took pleasure. The masculine line and firmness of his character made an aesthetic appeal to her, and the billowy softness and depth of the Mother Superior struck him favorably, but, above all, it was their difference in religion that salted their conversations. Each of them enjoyed, whenever they met in her straight, black-and-white little office, a sense of broadness, of enlightenment, of transcendent superiority to petty prejudice. My grandfather would remember that he wrote a check every Christmas for two Sisters of Charity who visited his office; Madame MacIllvra would perhaps recall her graduate studies and Hume. They had long, liberal talks which had the tone of
performances,
virtuoso feats of magnanimity were achieved on both sides. Afterward, they spoke of each other in nearly identical terms: “A very fine woman,” “A very fine man.”

All this (and possibly the suspicion that her verdict might be repeated at home) made Madame MacIllvra’s answer slow. “Perhaps God,” she murmured at last, “in His infinite mercy ...” Yet this formulation satisfied neither of us. God’s infinite mercy we believed in, but its manifestations were problematical. Sacred history showed us that it was more likely to fall on the Good Thief or the Woman Taken in Adultery than on persons of daily virtue and regular habits, like my grandfather. Our Catholic thoughts journeyed and met in a glance of alarmed recognition. Madame MacIllvra pondered. There were, of course, she said finally, other loopholes. If he had been improperly baptized ... a careless clergyman ...I considered this suggestion and shook my head. My grandfather was not the kind of man who, even as an infant, would have been guilty of a slovenly baptism.