Mary McCarthy's Collected Memoirs: Memories of a Catholic Girlhood, How I Grew, and Intellectual Memoirs (20 page)

Justice, good will, moderation, and
uncommon fidelity
—why should these substantives of virtue have stirred the Seminary’s Catiline? At the time, I was sublimely unaware that my fortifications had been breached, that the forces of law and order were pacifying the city while the rebel standard still waved on the ramparts. When I took Miss Gowrie’s midyear, I answered the question “Contrast the two Haeduan brothers” with an account of political affairs within the Haeduan tribe that greatly pleased Miss Gowrie but that Caesar, the impartial historian, would have eyed askance. “Good!
”
wrote Miss Gowrie opposite the passage in which I described the perfidious Dumnorix as embodying all the worst qualities of the American Indian. If the voice of Diviciacus always sounded grave and cautionary in the Roman councils, the sly hand of Dumnorix was always discovered at the bottom of every intrigue, every defection, every difficulty. If the Haeduans failed to supply the promised grain, it was Dumnorix who was back of it; if the Sequani allowed the Helvetians free passage, it was because they had been prompted by Dumnorix, who had married a daughter of Orgetorix, the Helvetian chieftain. Dumnorix’s light-fingered touch, like that of a savage, was everywhere. He had a clannish matrimonial eye; he matched a half sister here, a female cousin there, and even went so far as to marry off his mother to a chief of the Bituriges. Caesar was always forgiving him, “for the sake of the love he bore his brother, Diviciacus,” but in the end Dumnorix went too far. On the eve of the second invasion of Britain, he ran off with the Haeduan cavalry, and Caesar sent his own horsemen after him, with instructions to kill him if he resisted. “The death of Dumnorix is ironic,” I wrote (we had been studying irony in English), “because a fickle man dies adjuring his followers to keep faith with him.” “Very good,” commented Miss Gowrie. And yet Dumnorix died screaming that he was a free man and the son of a free state—“
saepe clamitans liberum se liberaeque esse civitatis.”

In later years, those screams of a cornered man have echoed reproachfully in my mind, particularly during the recent war, when they merged with the screams of other Gauls, other patriots and Resistance leaders who failed to keep faith with the conqueror. I saw the “good” Diviciacus as the archetypal quisling and felt the keenest vexation with my old Latin teacher for having steered me, as I conceived it, in a false direction. Today, I look at things in a more “balanced” perspective and find certain merits in Miss Gowrie’s point of view. We, too, have our expedient Diviciacuses, who, we are assured, are loyal to the democratic cause. The Pax Romana (in democratic hands, of course) once again appears to have its virtues, and we see the point of justice, moderation, and uncommon fidelity. If Caesar invented Caesarism, he had a distaste for blood. He shuddered and burst into tears when they brought him Pompey’s head, unsolicited, and in the Gallic Wars only three atrocities, minute by modern standards, defaced his record of clemency: the flogging to death of two chiefs and the cutting off of the hands of the defenders of Uxellodunum. Hail Caesar!

One thing, however, I now think I know for certain: Catiline was a gangster and a ruffian, just as that old bore, Cicero, said. I believe I already knew it that night in the gymnasium. What puzzles me is an eerie sense that Miss Gowrie, unsuspected by me, was my co-conspirator, that our predilections that year kept alternating, like the two little wooden weather figures in a German clock, one of which steps out as the other swings back into the works, in response to atmospheric pressures. I suddenly remember the curious pains that were taken over every detail of my outfitting—how the flame Indianhead was stenciled with gold to make my military cloak far more glorious than history would have permitted, while the outfits of the generals of the Republic were rented in a tawdry lot from a theatrical costumer. A recollection of my own surprise comes back to me, surprise that Miss Gowrie, the pedant, should have let me wear a costume that even I knew was wrong. And I recall, too, how the finest white kid ballerina slippers, used only by professionals, were purchased and dyed crimson to make my
calcei patricii mullei
(red leather shoes worn by the highest magistrates), with crisscrossed red tapes that Miss Gowrie herself bound up my calves: I was the only performer who had these; even Cicero wore sandals. Everything Catiline wore was of the finest and most costly; he was dressed like a statue in a primitive religious festival—no wonder the seventh and eighth grades applauded.

I have only to summon up Miss Gowrie’s tall, doll-like figure, with its rigid, jerky movements, and remember the mechanical pivoting of the round head and the short blink of the staring eyes to recognize the possibility of mild, clinical symptoms of the disease that adjusts itself to routine, to the performance of monotonous tasks, while the “real” patient, withdrawn, lives in a world of garish fantasies and symbols. I suspect, suddenly, that my childish rebelliousness and demagogic vanity may have been the tools of some absolutist world-dream of Miss Gowrie’s, just as these qualities, matured in the real Catiline, had been the tools of Caesar. Little as it meant to me then, I cannot get it out of my mind today that Catiline, in his brilliant costume, was a murderer, who slew his own brother-in-law and tortured a man to death.

In any case, Miss Gowrie certainly repented “Marcus Tullius” with all her Presbyterian conscience. A few days after the performance, she denounced me to the principal for some small infraction of the rules. Next, Caesar was reported, then Cicero. By exam week, the leaders of the Roman republic had virtually all been proscribed. Within the classroom, she was unaltered, patient, and even kindly in her arid, abrupt way. But in the dormitory that peculiar
Doppelgänger,
her duty, seemed to have taken total possession of her, like an evil spirit. Her drawer was filled with confiscated fountain pens; she tightened up the bath schedule and rapped on the door if you lingered; she seemed to stay up half the night listening for voices talking after lights out.

But I, too, had a duty, or so I thought—a duty to break the rules and take all offered risks, in order not to graduate in an orderly, commonplace fashion, and as spring advanced into early summer and the last week of school was on us, I had a sense that these two opposed duties were rushing inflexibly toward each other, like two trains on the same track. It happened one night in June; she caught me coming in the gym window on my way back from meeting a boy. We stood staring at each other in sorry recognition, Miss Gowrie in a brown bathrobe and I in my dew-dampened dress uniform. She was a poor sleeper; she had heard a noise and thought somebody was trying to get in to the swimming pool. We both knew that what I had done was the only crime that was considered serious by the principal. Miss Gowrie did not ask where I had been but sent me up to my room, where I could not sleep for wondering whether she would report me in the morning. School was as good as over, but I doubted whether that would deter Miss Gowrie. And if she told, I was finished, I supposed, for it was against my code of honor to lie when you were directly accused.

The next day, after lunch, I was called into the principal’s office. Miss Gowrie had reported me. After the first few minutes’ colloquy, in which the principal did
not
ask what I had been doing, I saw that I could graduate after all if I would make the concession of lying: I was the top student in my class, and the school, I perceived, was counting on me to do it credit in my college boards. We assessed each other steadily; we both understood the position and understood that the lie was a favor being asked of me, not only for my own sake and the school’s but on behalf of poor, misguided Miss Gowrie, who ought to have known better than to prowl about at night in her bathrobe in the last week of school. A sense of power and Caesarlike magnanimity filled me. I was going to equivocate, not for selfish reasons but in the interests of the community, like a grown-up, responsible person. I hesitated, seeking a formula that would not compromise principle too greatly. “I went out to smoke,” I finally proposed; this was true in the sense that at any rate I
had
smoked. The principal sighed, accepting this farfetched explanation. In a moment, I was on her lap and we were crying, chiefly from relief but partly, or so I sensed, in farewell to my childhood; I suddenly felt old and tired, like the principal herself. A few days later, our class graduated, and Miss Gowrie, in an old silk print dress, sat in the audience watching us with a hurt, puzzled expression as we pronounced our triumphant salutes and valedictions in our white caps and gowns, wearing our new pearls and wrist watches and pendants, surrounded by baskets of roses and irises sent by our relations and admirers.

Miss Gowrie did not return to the school, and I saw her only once more—that summer, following the college boards, when I asked her to lunch with me in a department-store tearoom in Seattle. It was a queer, empty meeting. She bore me no grudge for graduating, but I could see that she could find nothing to say to me now that the context of work and discipline was gone. She blinked at me bewilderedly as I smoked and talked showily about modern literature and college and tried to gossip about the school. I had brought my Caesar along, and together, at Miss Gowrie’s demand, we went over the translation that had been set in the college-board exam. I had not done as well as we had hoped. She ate a crackly dessert called “frange” that was popular in our city and experienced a slight indigestion. Filled with guilt, boredom, and a sense of helpless treachery to this mysterious individual who seemed to be wanting something I did not know how to give, I became confused and left my Caesar on the luncheon table. But if Miss Gowrie saw it as we were leaving, she said nothing and went her terse way, back to Canada and Empire. When I called for the book later, at the store Lost and Found, they told me it had not been turned in. Aside from the Latin grammar, the only souvenir of our acquaintance left to me was the pair of ballet slippers of the very finest kid that remained in my closet for fifteen years.

There are some semi-fictional touches here. My midyear exam paper for instance: I do not really know whether or not I was asked to contrast the two Haeduan brothers or whether I wrote, The death of Dumnorix is ironic because a fickle man dies adjuring his followers to keep faith with him.” But this was the kind of question Miss Gowrie would have given and the kind of answer I might have made. At some time, certainly, during the term I was asked to contrast the two Haeduans. The notion that Dumnorix was like an American Indian came to me much later, when I happened to be reading about the rising of Pontiac. This Indian chief had a brother who reminded me, at once, of Diviciacus. It is true that those two Gauls stuck in my mind like burrs. At one time, during the war, I had the idea of writing a novel, with historical interludes, about divided allegiances; one interlude was going to be devoted to the two brothers, and another to Parnell.

Miss Gowrie
was
always reporting her favorites for breaking the rules. She did report me for smoking, but I don’t think this happened the day after “Marcus Tullius.” This is an example of “storytelling”; I arranged actual events so as to make “a good story” out of them. It is hard to overcome this temptation if you are in the habit of writing fiction, one does it almost automatically.

I was discovered coming into the gymnasium after meeting a boy one spring evening, shortly before graduation. I think it was Miss Gowrie who caught me, but I am not positive. Sometimes I feel it was and sometimes I feel it wasn’t. I recall the sequel more clearly. The principal did invite me to equivocate as to what I had been doing. She was a great crier, and she cried again when I graduated, calling me “Cousin Mary” (she had the same name, Preston, as my grandfather, and they had done their genealogies together), and predicting that I would be an “ornament” to the Seminary. I cried, too, and our joint tears persuaded me that I had been a model pupil all along.

Miss Preston would have had to expel me, though, if the truth had come out, for the boy I had been meeting, in the woods back of the Seminary, was a strange person, a juvenile delinquent. He had lost one leg in a hunting accident and gone to the bad; his sister, I believe, had been a day girl at the Seminary, so that his case was well known to the principal. In reality, our meetings were innocent. We only smoked and talked, but no one would have credited that. I tried to put a darker complexion on it myself and wrote him a poem in study hall that showed the influence of Swinburne, Edna Millay, and possibly Dowson. I still know the first lines by heart:

Oh, boy that I have loved and shall not see again,

Be this to you a last and sweet farewell.

You are too young for me and far too evil.

Oh, boy whose beauty proved too great for me,

Smile but a little now and let me go.

The only truth in this poem was that I was slightly afraid of this good-looking boy. I was touched by his empty trouser leg and fascinated by the stories I had heard of his criminality, it was rumored that he had been in reform school. His actual age was seventeen—one year older than I was.

This episode, now that I examine it, does reflect the two themes of “The Figures in the Clock”: juvenile delinquency versus maturity. The crippled boy was, to me, a sort of Catiline, that is, a wild, defiant mirror image that I was reluctantly outgrowing. This was why I felt old in comparison to him, though when I made myself an Older Woman in the poem, I thought it was only to give a sad effect. His name was Hex (king), which made a funny link with my Latin studies. I noticed this at the time. That name was part of the charm he had for me, as we sat, side by side, on a little hill, his crutch thrown down, while younger members of his outlaw band circled the woods behind us, to warn us if anyone were coming. The poem was false, and yet it was true. It “tells the same story” as “The Figures in the Clock.”