Mary McCarthy's Collected Memoirs: Memories of a Catholic Girlhood, How I Grew, and Intellectual Memoirs (17 page)

“Oh, no, Mother,” I said, feeling somewhat embarrassed. “You don’t understand. It’s just a little cut, on my leg.” But Mother, again, was not listening; she appeared to have grown deaf, as the nuns had a habit of doing when what you were saying did not fit in with their ideas. And now that I knew what was in her mind, I was conscious of a funny constraint; I did not feel it proper to name a natural process, in so many words, to a nun. It was like trying not to think of their going to the bathroom or trying not to see the straggling iron-grey hair coming out of their coifs (the common notion that they shaved their heads was false). On the whole, it seemed better just to show her my cut. But when I offered to do so and unfastened my black stocking, she only glanced at my leg, cursorily. “That’s only a scratch, dear,” she said. “Now hurry up and put this on or you’ll be late for chapel. Have you any pain?” “No, no, Mother!” I cried. “You don’t understand!” “Yes, yes, I understand,” she replied soothingly, “and you will too, a little later. Mother Superior will tell you about it some time during the morning. There’s nothing to be afraid of. You have become a woman.”

“I know all about that,” I persisted. “Mother, please listen. I just cut my leg. On the athletic field. Yesterday afternoon.” But the more excited I grew, the more soothing, and yet firm, Mother Slattery became. There seemed to be nothing for it but to give up and do as I was bid. I was in the grip of a higher authority, which almost had the power to persuade me that it was right and I was wrong. But of course I was not wrong; that would have been too good to be true. While Mother Slattery waited, just outside my door, I miserably donned the equipment she had given me, for there was no place to hide it, on account of drawer inspection. She led me down the hall to where there was a chute and explained how I was to dispose of the flannel thing, by dropping it down the chute into the laundry. (The convent arrangements were very old-fashioned, dating back, no doubt, to the days of Louis Philippe.)

The Mother Superior, Madame MacIllvra, was a sensible woman, and all through my early morning classes, I was on pins and needles, chafing for the promised interview with her which I trusted would clear things up.
“Ma Mère,”
I would begin, “Mother Slattery thinks ...” Then I would tell her about the cut and the athletic field. But precisely the same impasse confronted me when I was summoned to her office at recess-time. I talked about my cut, and
she
talked about becoming a woman. It was rather like a round, in which she was singing “Scotland’s burning, Scotland’s burning,” and I was singing “Pour on water, pour on water.” Neither of us could hear the other, or, rather, I could hear her, but she could not hear me. Owing to our different positions in the convent, she was free to interrupt me, whereas I was expected to remain silent until she had finished speaking. When I kept breaking in, she hushed me, gently, and took me on her lap. Exactly like Mother Slattery, she attributed all my references to the cut to a blind fear of this new, unexpected reality that had supposedly entered my life. Many young girls, she reassured me, were frightened if they had not been prepared. “And you, Mary, have lost your dear mother, who could have made this easier for you.” Rocked on Madame MacIllvra’s lap, I felt paralysis overtake me and I lay, mutely listening, against her bosom, my face being tickled by her white, starched, fluted wimple, while she explained to me how babies were born, all of which I had heard before.

There was no use fighting the convent. I had to pretend to have become a woman, just as, not long before, I had had to pretend to get my faith back—for the sake of peace. This pretense was decidedly awkward. For fear of being found out by the lay sisters downstairs in the laundry (no doubt an imaginary contingency, but the convent was so very thorough), I reopened the cut on my leg, so as to draw a little blood to stain the napkins, which were issued me regularly, not only on this occasion, but every twenty-eight days thereafter. Eventually, I abandoned this bloodletting, for fear of lockjaw, and trusted to fate. Yet I was in awful dread of detection; my only hope, as I saw it, was either to be released from the convent or to become a woman in reality, which might take a year, at least, since I was only twelve. Getting out of athletics once a month was not sufficient compensation for the farce I was going through. It was not my fault; they had forced me into it; nevertheless, it was I who would look silly—worse than silly; half mad—if the truth ever came to light.

I was burdened with this guilt and shame when the nickname finally found me out. “Found me out,” in a general sense, for no one ever did learn the particular secret I bore about with me, pinned to the linen band. “We’ve got a name for you,” Elinor and Mary called out to me, one day on the playground. “What is it?” I asked, half hoping, half fearing, since not all their sobriquets were unfavorable. “Cye,” they answered, looking at each other and laughing. “‘Si’?” I repeated, supposing that it was based on Simple Simon. Did they regard me as a hick? “C.Y.E.,” they elucidated, spelling it out in chorus. “The letters stand for something. Can you guess?” I could not and I cannot now. The closest I could come to it in the convent was “Clean Your Ears.” Perhaps that was it, though in later life I have wondered whether it did not stand, simply, for “Clever Young Egg” or “Champion Young Eccentric.” But in the convent I was certain that it stood for something horrible, something even worse than dirty ears (as far as I knew, my ears were clean), something I could never guess because it represented some aspect of myself that the world could see and I couldn’t, like a sign pinned on my back. Everyone in the convent must have known what the letters stood for, but no one would tell me. Elinor and Mary had made them promise. It was like halitosis; not even my best friend, my deskmate, Louise, would tell me, no matter how much I pleaded. Yet everyone assured me that it was “very good,” that is, very apt. And it made everyone laugh.

This name reduced all my pretensions and solidified my sense of
wrongness.
Just as I felt I was beginning to belong to the convent, it turned me into an outsider, since I was the only pupil who was not in the know. I liked the convent, but it did not like me, as people say of certain foods that disagree with them. By this, I do not mean that I was actively unpopular, either with the pupils or with the nuns. The Mother Superior cried when I left and predicted that I would be a novelist, which surprised me. And I had finally made friends; even Emilie von Phul smiled upon me softly out of her bright blue eyes from the far end of the study hall. It was just that I did not fit into the convent pattern; the simplest thing I did, like asking for a clean sheet, entrapped me in consequences that I never could have predicted. I was not bad; I did not consciously break the rules; and yet I could never, not even for a week, get a pink ribbon, and this was something I could not understand, because I was trying as hard as I could. It was the same case as with the hated name; the nuns, evidently, saw something about me that was invisible to me.

The oddest part was all that pretending. There I was, a walking mass of lies, pretending to be a Catholic and going to confession while really I had lost my faith, and pretending to have monthly periods by cutting myself with nail scissors; yet all this had come about without my volition and even contrary to it. But the basest pretense I was driven to was the acceptance of the nickname. Yet what else could I do? In the convent, I could not live it down. To all those girls, I had become “Cye McCarthy.” That was who I was. That was how I had to identify myself when telephoning my friends during vacations to ask them to the movies: “Hello, this is Cye.” I loathed myself when I said it, and yet I succumbed to the name totally, making myself over into a sort of hearty to go with it—the kind of girl I hated. “Cye” was my new patron saint. This false personality stuck to me, like the name, when I entered public high school, the next fall, as a freshman, having finally persuaded my grandparents to take me out of the convent, although they could never get to the bottom of my reasons, since, as I admitted, the nuns were kind, and I had made many nice new friends. What I wanted was a fresh start, a chance to begin life over again, but the first thing I heard in the corridors of the public high school was that name called out to me, like the warmest of welcomes: “Hi, there, Si!” That was the way they thought it was spelled. But this time I was resolute. After the first weeks, I dropped the hearties who called me “Si” and I never heard it again. I got my own name back and sloughed off Clementina and even Therese—the names that did not seem to me any more to be mine but to have been imposed on me by others. And I preferred to think that Mary meant “bitter” rather than “star of the sea.”

A good deal of stress has been laid on the unprepossessing appearance my classmates and I made. I felt the same way, on the whole, about my class in boarding school and even, to some extent, in college. That was why my eyes were always on the older girls, and why I courted a popularity with them which, in the nature of things (for of course they looked down on me), I could not have. I do not possess any photographs of my class in Forest Ridge, but recently some pictures have turned up of my class in boarding school which more than confirm my memory. Why this class, the class that graduated from school in ’29 and from college in ’33, should have been homelier than the classes preceding it is a mystery, perhaps there was something in the air. But it explains the feeling I had as a young girl of something unattainable, something just ahead of me—beauty, virtue, grace—that I could never catch up with.

My grades went to pieces in public high school; I nearly failed English, which was normally my best subject. The atmosphere in public high school was, in many ways, like that of the parochial school, except that the education was poorer and there was no discipline. It was the style to have crushes on boys, and I had a crush on the captain of the football team and on the captain of the track team, so that I spent my time following athletic events, as a member of the cheering section, instead of studying. The school was called Garfield High, and I was one of its most ardent rooters; I followed basketball too, back and forth across the city, to the various high schools we played. I was not allowed to go out with boys, but one night the captain of the track team drove up to my house in his roadster and honked for me to join him. My grandfather flashed on the front porch lights and thundered at him to go away, and that was the end of my conquest.

Another of the track man’s admirers was a shy, intellectual Jewish girl named Ethel Rosenberg (she later changed her first name to Teya) who was also an enthusiast for Walter Pater. She and I became friends; we lived not far from each other. Through her family, who were typical Jewish intellectuals and very hospitable, though not well-to-do (the father was a tailor), I came to know the artistic colony in Seattle and to read serious books. But all this took place on a different plane from my other activities. The only point of fusion had been the track man.

After a year of public high school, my grandparents concluded that there was nothing to do but put me into boarding school, away from the distractions offered by the opposite sex. A convent, this time, was not considered; I was old enough, now, my grandfather said, to choose for myself in religious matters. An Episcopal boarding school in Tacoma, the Annie Wright Seminary, was selected, though I myself had wanted to go to the Anna Head School in California, because Helen Wills had gone there. But the family thought it wiser to keep me nearer home.

Meanwhile, my brothers remained in Saint Benedict’s Academy, my youngest brother, Sheridan, had joined the other two. They were kept there, with the nuns, during Christmas and Easter vacations, in the summer, they were parceled out among relations or sent to camp. It was six years before we saw each other again, and then they were almost strangers to me, so different had been our bringing-up. I was a child of wealth, and they were little pensioners on the trust fund that was left by my grandfather McCarthy when he died. My share, which was equal to each of theirs, never did more than pay my school board and tuition; the Prestons took care of the rest. All my brothers’ expenses, however, were itemized and deducted from the account. The Preston family “remembered” them with checks at Christmas and birthdays, but that was all. Except on these occasions, their existence seems to have been overlooked.

When I review my grandfather’s character, I find this very puzzling. He was not the man to neglect an obligation; his bills were paid the day he received them—a habit still recalled by my New York dentist with awe. Order, exactitude, fairness—these were the traits my grandfather was famous for and the traits I always found in him. Wow, especially knowing what he did of the treatment we had received in Minneapolis, did he fail to concern himself with what happened later to my brothers
?
I cannot explain this.

He was not an ungenerous or an unfeeling man. He had been strongly attached to my mother. “The Preston family wanted all of you,” my mother’s old friend writes me, as if in extenuation. Failing to get all four of us, my grandfather may have responded with a kind of masculine pique, holding himself stiffly aloof from what had been refused him,
i.e.,
my brothers. Or he may have been angered by the slurs cast on him by the McCarthys: my uncle Harry, a few years before, had written a bank in Seattle to inquire into his financial position. Whatever the reason for this surprising indifference, I cannot deny the fact of it. Nor can I deny that I felt it, too. Until I was grown up, the idea never crossed my mind that something might have been done by the Prestons for my brothers as well as for me. The only persons, evidently, to whom this idea occurred were the McCarthys.

The Figures in the Clock

N
OT LONG AGO, HUNTING
the rule for the formation of the vocative with my thirteen-year-old son, I pulled down from a top shelf my old Allen and Greenough Latin grammar. The worn green book fell open at the flyleaf, and I saw my name, school, and class written in ink, in the ornate handwriting I had been forming during my idle hours in Annie Wright Seminary in Tacoma. Three years before, I had been sent there despairingly by my grandparents, after a year in public high school. The Sacred Heart nuns, they thought, had made me an atheist; the public high school had made me boy crazy—what next? Peering over my shoulder, my young bantam crowed to find that his haughty mother had dotted her is with circles; there they were, spattered over the page like bird droppings. Otherwise, the hand was my own, with its Greek e’s, flamboyant scroll capitals, and narrow, precisian small letters; it dashed us both to perceive that already, in my senior year in boarding school, my present character had been set. Upside down on the same page, written in pencil in a far more careless style, was a list of some kind. I inverted the book and stared. Next to three crudely drawn cylinders (the influence of physics?) and enclosed in a rough bracket was the following: