Mary McCarthy's Collected Memoirs: Memories of a Catholic Girlhood, How I Grew, and Intellectual Memoirs (25 page)

On Sundays, sometimes, we were taken to lunch at her house, out by Lake Washington. Two things we loved to do there. One was to crawl under the table while the grownups were still eating and find the bulge in the carpet where there was a bell she stepped on when she wanted the maid to come in. The bulge or little mound in the carpet was rather hard to locate, with all the feet and the women’s skirts in the way, but eventually we found it and made the bell ring. It was nice under there, with the white tablecloth hanging down all around us like a tent. The carpet was thick and soft and furry, and if we peered out, we could see exotic birds on the wallpaper. I don’t remember anyone’s telling us not to get under the table, but one Sunday, perhaps the last time we went there, we could not find the bulge at all, and I remember the strange, scary feeling this gave me, as though I had been dreaming or making up a story and there had never been any bulge or bell in the first place. It did not occur to us that the bell must have been removed to keep us from annoying the maid, and the mystery of its disappearance used to plague me, long after we had left Seattle, like some maddening puzzle. I would lie awake in my new bed, thinking about the bell and wishing I could be given another chance to look for it. Five years later, when I was brought back to that house to live, a girl of eleven, I had the great joy, the vindication, of finding the bell just where I thought it should be, between her feet and mine.

The other thing we liked to do was, after lunch, to roll down her terraces, which dropped in grassy tiers from her tall house right down, I remembered, to Lake Washington. We rolled and rolled, almost into the water, it seemed, and nobody stopped us until it was time to go home, our white Sunday clothes smeared with green stains. The grass was like velvet, and there were flower beds all around and a smell of roses; a sprinkler was going somewhere, and there were raspberries that we ate off bushes. Alas, when I came back, I found I had been dreaming. The grounds did not go down to the lake but only to the next block, below, and there was only one grass bank; the second one was wild, covered with blackberry prickers, and it had always been so, they said. I rolled a few times down the single green slope, but it was not the same; only five or six turns and I had reached the bottom; I could not recapture the delicious dizzy sensation I remembered so well. And the raspberries, which I had been looking forward to eating, did not belong to us but to the people next door.

The strange lady was supposed to be my grandmother, but I did not think of her that way when I was little. She did not have white hair, for one thing, like my other grandmother—the real one, as I considered her. Nor did she do embroidery or tapestry work or stare at us over her glasses. She did not have glasses, only a peculiar ornament on a chain that she put up to her eyes when she wanted to look at something. With her queer electric car that ran soundlessly and was upholstered inside in the softest grey like a jewel case, her dotted veil, her gloves, which had bumps in them (made by her rings, I discovered later), her bell, and her descending terraces, she was a fairy-tale person who lived in an enchanted house, which was full of bulges, too—two overhanging balconies, on the lake side, and four bays and a little tower. (She had a fairytale sister, different from herself, tall, with white hair piled on top of her head in a long, conical shape, a towering mountain peak or a vanilla ice-cream cone; we were taken to see her one day and her house was magic also. She had a whole polar bear for a rug, and her floor shone like glass and made you slip when you walked on it; her house was like a winter palace or like the North Pole, where Santa Claus came from.) I did not love the strange lady in the electric but I loved the things she had.

The last time I saw her, in this pristine, fairy-tale period, was in the elevator of the Hotel Washington, where we were staying because our house had been sold and we were moving away from Seattle. She was wearing a funny white mask, like the one the doctor had worn when they took my tonsils out; I heard the word “epidemic,” and I think she told my mother that we should have masks, too, when we rode up and down in the elevator—a thing we were fond of doing. But I did not like the masks.

We were very sick on the train. Then, one day, I saw her again, in a place where she did not belong, a place called Minneapolis, where my other grandmother lived. I was sick and just getting better, lying in an iron bed in my other grandmother’s sewing room, when the strange lady came in, with a different kind of veil on, a black one, which hung all the way down over her face. She flung it back, and her face looked dreadful, as if she had been crying. Then she sat down on my bed, and her husband, Grandpa Preston, sat on a straight chair beside it. She sobbed and her husband patted her, saying something like “Come now, Gussie,” which appeared to be her name. She wiped her tears with a handkerchief; they went away on tiptoe, telling me to be a good girl. I did not understand any of this; my reason was offended by her turning up here in Minneapolis when I knew she lived in Seattle. No one enlightened me; I heard the word “flu,” but it was months before it dawned on me that the occasion had been my parents’ funeral. Yet when I surmised, finally, that Mama and Daddy were not coming back, I felt a certain measure of relief. One mystery, at least, was cleared up; the strange lady had come and cried on my bed because her daughter was dead. I did not see her again till five years later, when she was standing in the depot in Seattle in a hat with a black dotted veil, pulled tight across her face, which was heavily rouged and powdered. By this time, I knew that she was my grandmother, that she was Jewish, and dyed her hair.

The last of these items was a canard. Her hair was naturally black, black as a raven’s wing and with a fine silky gloss, like loose skeins of embroidery thread. When she was over eighty and bedridden, the first sprinkling of white hairs began to appear in her thick, shining permanent. Brushing it, the nurses used to marvel (“Wonderful, isn’t it? You’d swear, at first, it was dye”), but this triumph over her calumniators came too late. The nurses could testify, my uncles and their wives could testify, I could testify, but whom were we to tell? Within the immediate family, we had always given her the benefit of the doubt, though I recall my grandfather’s uneasy face when she went to have her first permanent, for in those days dyed hair did not take well to the process and was reputed to turn green or orange. It was the outsiders—the distant in-laws, the ladies who bowed to my grandmother in the shops and then turned aside to whisper something—whom I should have liked to make eat their words now, in particular my other grandmother, with her reiterated, crushing question “Who ever saw natural hair
that
color?” But she was in her mausoleum, unavailable for comment, and the others were gone, too. My grandmother had outlived them all—an unfortunate state of affairs. Moreover, she herself was no longer in a condition to appreciate or even understand her victory; on her energetic days, she would ask me to fetch her hand mirror from her bureau and, frowning into it, would set herself to plucking out those stray white hairs, not realizing that they were the proof she had long been needing to show that her hair was truly black.

She had been a beautiful woman, “the most beautiful woman in Seattle,” my friends’ mothers used to tell me, adding that my mother, in her day, had been the most beautiful woman in Seattle, too. I can see it in the case of my mother, but my grandmother does not appear beautiful to me in the few photographs that exist of her as a young woman. Handsome, I would say, with a long, narrow, high-nosed, dark-eyed, proud, delicate face, the pure forehead topped by severe, somewhat boyish curls, such as the Romantic poets used to cultivate. A Biblical Jewish face that might have belonged to the young Rachel when Jacob first saw her. Her ears were pierced, and in one photograph she is wearing a pair of round, button-style earrings that lend her, somehow, a Russian appearance; in another, where she is posed with my mother as a little girl, her hair is caught in a big dark hair ribbon that gives her the air of a student. She has a gentle, open, serious mien—qualities I would never associate with the sharp, jaunty woman I knew or with the woman of the mature photograph on her chiffonier. Perhaps fashions in photography are responsible for the difference or perhaps her character changed radically during the early years of her marriage. The long, dreamy countenance became short, broad, and genial; the wide eyes narrowed and drew closer together. The change is so profound as to evoke the question “What happened?” The young woman in the photographs looks as though she could be easily hurt.

She came to Seattle from San Francisco, where her father had been what she called a “broker.” Whether she meant a pawnbroker, I never could discover. He was a Forty-niner, having gone out to California in the gold rush, after a year in Pennsylvania. He had left Europe during the troubles of ’48, and I like to think he was a political
émigré,
but I do not know. I do not know, though I once asked her, what part of Europe he came from. Poland, I suspect; her name, however, was German: Morganstern. Her first name was Augusta. These few sketchy facts were all she seemed to know of her early life and family history, and it puzzled her that anyone should want to find out more. “All those old things, Mary,” she would say to me half grumpily. “Why do you keep asking me all those old things?” Like many great beauties, she had little curiosity; for nearly ten years, she did not know the name of the family who had moved into the house next door to us.

Her parents had died when she was quite young—in her teens—and she and her younger sister, my Aunt Rosie, came to live in Seattle with an older sister, Eva, who had married a fur importer named Aronson; this was the lady with the polar-bear rug. The girls had had some private education; my grandmother, at one time, used to play the piano—rather prettily, I imagine. She had a pleasing speaking voice and a surprising knowledge of classical music. “Were you rich or poor?” I asked her once, trying to learn the source of these accomplishments. “My father had a nice business,” she replied. She had read the Russian novelists; when I sought to introduce her to Tolstoy and Dostoevski, she gave her dry laugh and said they had been the popular writers of her youth. All her life, she retained a taste for long novels that went on from generation to generation, on the model of
War and Peace.
She hated short stories, because, she said, just as you got to know the characters, the story ended; it was not worth the trouble. Her sister Rose was fourteen when the two arrived in Seattle; Aunt Rosie went out and inspected the University of Washington, which had just been started, and decided she knew more than the professors did, a fact she faced up to ruefully, since she had been yearning for a higher education.

Aunt Rosie was a very different person from my grandmother, yet they talked together on the phone for nearly an hour every day and often went “downtown” together in the afternoon, my grandmother stopping by at her house to pick her up in the electric, later in the Chrysler or the La Salle. Aunt Rosie was a short, bright, very talkative, opinionated woman, something of a civic activist and something of a Bohemian. She had married an easygoing New York Jew, Uncle Mose Gottstein, a juicy, cigar-smoking man who ran a furniture store, subscribed to the New York
Times,
and liked to chat about current events, his cigar tilted at a reflective angle, upward, in his cherry-red mouth. He and Aunt Rosie often sat up all night, in their first-floor bedroom, with its big walnut double bed, Uncle Mose in his nightgown reading the newspapers, and Aunt Rosie playing a solitaire, which she would not leave till it came out. Uncle Mose had fond recollections of Luchow’s and of Jimmy Durante, whom he remembered as a singing waiter, and their big bedroom, strewn with newsprint and playing cards and smelling of cigar smoke, was like a club or a café. Aunt Rosie and her husband and two sons always sat there, even in the daytime, instead of in the living room or the little parlor, which was lined with signed photographs of opera stars and violinists and pianists. Aunt Rosie had “known them all”; in her youth, she had been a vocal soloist, much in demand for weddings and special services in Seattle’s Protestant churches. Later, she had managed the musical events at Seattle’s Metropolitan Theatre; the high point of her life had been a trip she took to Vancouver with Chaliapin, about whom Uncle Mose liked to twit her, his small, moist eyes (he later developed cataracts) beaming behind his glasses, his apple cheeks flushed. Aunt Rosie had met other artistes besides Chaliapin and the various divas, including Mary Garden and Galli-Curci, who had inscribed their photographs to her; thanks to her theater connection, she had known Houdini and the Great Alexander and could explain the magicians’ acts by the fact that there was a trapdoor on the Metropolitan Theatre’s stage. When I knew her, she was running the Ladies’ Musical Club.

Aunt Rosie was poor, compared to her sisters. Her husband was the kind of man who is chronically unsuccessful in business—the genial uncle nearly every Jewish family possesses who has to be helped out by the others. Aunt Rosie had a plain “girl” to give her a hand with the housework; she dressed very unmodishly and lived in a somewhat run-down section in a smallish frame house that needed painting. She was active in the temple as well as in the musical world. The cookbook of the Ladies’ Auxiliary of the Temple de Hirsch, a volume got up for charity and much used in our family—I still own a copy—has many recipes contributed by Mrs. M. A. Gottstein. Her chicken stewed with noodles, hamburger in tomatoes, and rhubarb pie are quite unlike the recipes contributed by Mrs. S. A. Aronson, my other great-aunt, which begin with directions like this: “Take a nice pair of sweetbreads, add a cup of butter, a glass of good cream, sherry, and some
foie gras.”
Or her recipe for baked oysters: “Pour over each caviar and cream, and dot with bits of butter. Serve hot.”

Aunt Rosie, with her energy, her good heart, and rattling, independent tongue, was a popular woman in Seattle, among all classes and kinds. Society ladies fond of music gushed over “the wonderful Mrs. Gottstein”; poor Jewish ladies in the temple praised her; Protestant clergymen respected her (they used to try, she told me, to convert her when she was younger, because she sang their anthems with such feeling); judges, politicians, butchers, poor tailors, clerks in bookstores all knew Aunt Rosie. She had not let the Protestant ministers tempt her away from her religion, but she was a truly open person, able to cross barriers naturally because she did not notice they were there. Most of the Jews in Seattle lived a life apart, concerned with
bar mizvahs
and weddings, and family and business affairs; a few, with German-sounding names, managed to cross into the Gentile world and get their sons pledged to regular fraternities at the university, leaving temple and observances behind them. Aunt Rosie was a unique case. Her Jewishness—that is, her bounce and volubility—was a positive asset to her in her dealings with the Gentile ascendancy. If my grandmother’s marriage (to a Gentile) had made it a little easier for Aunt Rosie to get around, Aunt Rosie, I think, never suspected it; she had a lively self-conceit and no social envy or ambition. To her good-humored mind, being Jewish was simply a matter of religion.