Mary McCarthy's Collected Memoirs: Memories of a Catholic Girlhood, How I Grew, and Intellectual Memoirs (27 page)

Later, they went to Chicago for the World’s Fair with my Aunt Eva, and this was the subject of another anecdote. She and Aunt Eva were left at a stop in Montana, when the train drew out unexpectedly while they were buying post cards in the station. Another passenger, a man, seeing their predicament, jumped out of the train and said to my grandmother, “Can I be of assistance to you, Madam?” Somehow (I forget the details), he managed to get the train to come back for them or to wait at the next station for them to arrive by carriage. But my grandfather was terribly jealous; as soon as he saw them again, he accused my grandmother of having got off the train to be with the strange man. And she never could convince him differently all the rest of her life.

There was the time the house caught on fire while my grandmother was downtown shopping. When she boarded the Cherry Street trolley to go home (her house was way out, almost in the country, then), the conductor said to her, “Mrs. Preston, your house is on fire,” and she arrived on the scene to find the fire engine there and (yes, she swore it) their one-eyed maid, Tilda, carrying the piano out of the house balanced, on one hand, like a tray; all the little boys in the neighborhood were sitting on the lawn, reading her love letters from my grandfather, which they had found in a bureau drawer. There was the time her riding horse ran away with her, down in Gearhart, Oregon, and there was an incident, I think, with a rowboat. There was the time she came to our house, when my mother had been taken to the hospital to have our little brother, and found the three of us sitting on the floor of the living room, making a bonfire of my father’s lawbooks and pointing his loaded revolver at each other.

My grandmother was a gifted
raconteuse
when she could be induced to tell one of her stories. She acted out all the parts zestfully, particularly her own, and short trills of unwilling laughter proceeded from her as she spoke; when she had finished, she would have to wipe her eyes with a handkerchief. This power of being amused at herself, this perpetual dismay, made one see her in these disconcerting situations, which had a classic plot—the plot of a nightmare, really.

Someone, usually a man, laconically breaks her an untoward piece of news, or fails to break it successfully, as in the case of the long underwear. Or it is a runaway horse, a runaway train, a runaway buggy, a rocking boat, a loaded revolver; my grandmother is always helpless while some uncontrollable event unfolds before her eyes. (There was the story of the crazy piano tuner who without a by-your-leave walked into her parlor and took the piano apart as my grandmother watched, unable to stop him, bewitched by his flow of talk: “A beautiful instrument, Madam ... So you have neglected your lovely musical gift [an imitation of him shaking his head]. Believe me, Madam, you owe it to the world and to your husband and family to take up the instrument again. ...” At the end of the story, naturally, the dismembered piano was lying on the floor; he had forgotten how to put it together again.) She is always the loser in these anecdotes; she never gets the better of the situation with a biting retort, as she often did in real life. But because she is the heroine, she is usually rescued, in the nick of time.

In my grandmother’s narratives, it is the other person who is self-possessed, full of an almost supernatural assurance—the stranger alighting from the moving train in a single airy bound, like an acrobat sliding down a rope to bow at her feet. She is forever disconcerted, put out of countenance, dumb-struck. In reality,
she
was the disconcerting one, short of speech when she was not telling a story (and to get her to tell a story usually took a lot of coaxing), impassive, forbidding. Most people, including all my friends, were afraid of her.

The first thing that would have struck an outsider about her in her later years—that is, when she was in her sixties and seventies—was the oddity of her appearance. If you saw her downtown, shopping in Frederick’s or Magnin’s—and she never did anything but shop any afternoon of her life, excluding Sundays, matinee days, and the days of the racing meetings—you would probably ask the salesgirl who she was: a woman of medium height, a little plump but not fat, wearing a small, high-crowned hat topped with ribbons or feathers, pumps with Cuban heels, fabric gloves, an onyx-and-diamond
lorgnon,
a smart dress in black or navy, printed or solid color, with a fur piece over it—silver fox or baum marten. This would be in summer. In the fall, she might be wearing a dark-green wool ensemble trimmed with leopard, or a black one trimmed with monkey, or a beige one trimmed with beige broadtail or caracul. In the winter, she would have on her mink or her Persian or her squirrel or her broadtail. She would be proceeding at a stately walk through the store, stopping to finger something at a counter, smiling at the salespeople, nodding. Her clothes in themselves should not have attracted attention. She disliked bright colors and never wore anything but black, navy, dark green, beige, or wine. Nor were the styles youthful or extreme. She was careful about her skirt lengths; her dresses were lavish in tucks and shirring, but the cut was simple and discreet. She wore small pearl earrings and a short string of pearls; her rings were concealed by her gloves. Underneath the gloves, her nails were natural color, polished with a buffer. Nor did her toilet table contain a lipstick. Yet the whole effect she made was of an indescribable daring.

It was partly the black hair, so improbably black and glossy. It was partly the mascara and the eye shadow surrounding her black narrow watchful eyes, though these aids to beauty were not applied carelessly but with an infinite discretion. It was the rouge, perhaps, most of all, the rouge and the powder and the vanishing cream underneath. When she perspired, on a warm day, the little beads of sweat on her eagle nose under her nose veil and on her long upper lip would produce a caked look that seemed sad, as though her skin were crying. Yet not even her cosmetics and the world of consummate artifice they suggested could account for the peculiarly florid impression she made as she moved across the store, peering through her
lorgnon
at the novelties and notions, and vanished into the elevator, up to the lending library or the custom-made or the hat department—her favorite purlieus—where elderly salespeople,
her
salespeople, would hurry up to greet her, throwing their arms around her, just as though they had not seen her the day before.

“Have you got anything for me?” my grandmother would demand of Mrs. Slaughter, the red-haired hat lady at Frederick’s, surveying the premises with a kind of jesting coquetry, a hand on her hip. This was the same tone she took with the clerks in the circulating library or with the butcher on the telephone—a tone of challenging banter, as though she defied these people, her suitors, to please her.

On a good day, Mrs. Slaughter would bring out two or three hats she had “put away” for my grandmother in a special cupboard. “They just came in,” she would whisper. “I’ve been saving them for you.” My grandmother would try them on before the mirror, tilting her head sideward and back in an odd way she had, at once vain and highly self-critical. If she liked one of them well enough, she would walk to the full-length mirror and assay herself, thrusting one small foot forward and balancing back and forth, seeming to weigh herself and the hat in the scales of judgment. To my disappointment, watching her, she never bought on the spot. She would set the hat or hats back on the table, as if she were through with them, and Mrs. Slaughter, who seemed to be a mind reader, would whisk them back into the special cupboard, where they would wait, out of sight of other customers, for several days or even a week, while my grandmother arrived at a decision. She was the same with her shoes and dresses; she would even coquette with a piece of meat; it was as though she would not give these things the satisfaction of letting them see that she liked them. To her, every piece of merchandise, suing for her favor, appeared to enter the masculine gender and to be subject, therefore, to rebuff. Yet the salespeople were all eager to oblige her, for she was a good customer, and, more than that, underneath her badinage, always good-humored.

It pleased her to pretend to be cross with them; indeed, in all her relations, she had an air of just consenting to be mollified. Her veteran salespeople would flatter her (“You’re looking younger every day, Mrs. Preston. Nobody would believe this young lady was your granddaughter. Make her pass for your daughter”), and my grandmother would hide her gratification in a short, tart, scathing laugh. Actually, they were proud of her, for she did look remarkably young, despite her blazonry of make-up; she
could
have passed for my mother. They were genuinely fond of her. “Take care of yourself,” they would call after her, and some of them used to kiss her. My grandmother pretended to be suspicious of these manifestations; a muscle moved, like a protest, in her cheek while the kiss was being planted.

She was lonely. That was the thing that made her seem so garish and caused people to turn their heads when she went by. Loneliness is a garish quality, and my grandmother’s wardrobe and elaborate toilette appeared flamboyant because they emphasized her isolation. An old woman trying to look young is a common enough sight, but my grandmother was something stranger and sadder—a hermit all dressed up for a gala, a recluse on stubborn parade. Tagging along, even as a little girl, I was half conscious of the bizarre figure my grandmother cut, and if I had not known her, my imagination might have woven some story around her for a school composition—the holocaust, at the very least, of all her nearest and dearest, her husband gone to prison, her children branded as traitors. ...

But in fact, during the years I knew her best, the years after I had left the convent and was in boarding school in Tacoma, she had a husband; two sons, whom she saw every day (one of them lived at home and went to the University, and the other lived across the street with an exemplary wife); two sisters, whom she saw nearly every day; a sister-in-law, Aunt Alice Carr, who lived downtown in the Sorrento Hotel; a granddaughter (myself) who came home from school for vacations; a cook; and an old gardener who had been with her twenty-five years—the original family coachman. All these people were devoted to her. She was independent; she had her own investments and drove her own car. Every winter, my grandfather took her to California, where they ate at the best restaurants and lived at the best hotels and went to the races at Santa Anita and at Tia Juana, over the border. He was a distinguished citizen, with a prosperous law practice, a reputation for immense integrity, and countless friends and cronies. During my sophomore year in boarding school, he had taken her to New York, where they had seen nearly every play on the board and she had had an outfit made by a smart new designer in a new color called “kasha,” an exact copy of an outfit worn by Katharine Cornell in
The Green Hat
, and he had taken her to Washington, where they had had an interview with Calvin Coolidge.

She had nothing to complain of in life. There was nothing wrong with her health, except for a mild diabetic condition that the best local specialist was controlling and a high blood pressure that was not dangerous but that gave her headaches in the afternoons. Nor did she complain; she was a little fretful sometimes when she was having her headaches, but she possessed an equable temper, the result, no doubt, of self-discipline. She and I used to quarrel, and she had much to find fault with in my conduct. She worried a good deal about her younger son’s late hours. But she was never cross or nagging. It was only much later, when she grew senile, that she became difficult to deal with, capricious and fault-finding, sending the cook downtown to return a mascara applier that dissatisfied her, pushing her food away, soughing, and making faces.

But until she reached her second childhood, she seemed, on the surface, a contented woman, well situated in life, self-contained, unemotional. The only blights she had suffered, so far as I knew, were the unseasonable death of my mother and a mastoid operation that had left her with some scars, just under her ears, in her neck and lower cheeks. If she was cold to me for a few days, or stopped speaking, abruptly, to Gertrude, or feuded with my grandfather’s brother, Uncle Clarence, these were mere quirks—the privileges of beauty—that did nobody any harm. She was not a demonstrative person, but neither were her sons or her husband or her daughter-in-law; they all seemed to have been cut from the same bolt of cloth. I was the only member of the family—not counting Aunt Rosie—who was excitable.

When I was first brought back from Minneapolis to live with my grandparents (and this remained my official home until I was twenty-one and married), I was impressed by our house and its appurtenances, much as I had been as a young child: the bay-window seat in the parlor, the cabinet with opaline Tiffany glass and little demitasse cups, all different, the grass wallpaper, the pongee-silk curtains, the sleeping porches upstairs, the hawthorn tree in front of the house, the old carriage block with the name
“PRESTON”
carved on it, the date “1893” over the front door, the Kelvinator in the kitchen, the bell system, the generator in the garage that charged the electric, the silver samovar, the Rhine-wine glasses (never used), with green bowls and crystal stems. To me, the house was like a big toy, full of possibilities for experiment and discovery; I was constantly changing my sleeping quarters—out to the sleeping porch behind my bathroom, upstairs to the little room under the eaves on the cook’s floor, back again to my green-and-violet bedroom; once, I even got permission to sleep outdoors, in the moonlight, on the back lawn, overlooking the lake.

The room I was given had been redone for me; I had lots of pretty new clothes, made by my grandmother’s own dressmaker; the gardener drove me about in the electric and let me practice steering; I did not have to wear glasses any more, as I had had to in Minneapolis, and I could read anything I wanted to in the family library: Dickens and Frank Stockton and Bulwer-Lytton and Sienkiewicz, and the Elsie Dinsmore books, which had belonged to my mother. I could look through the stereopticon, or play an old record of “Casey at the Bat” on the new Victrola. Everything we had seemed superior to anything anyone else had—the flowers in our garden, the vegetables on the table, which we grew ourselves in the lower back yard, instead of getting them from the store, as other people did. We had strawberry beds, too, and rows of currant bushes, a crab-apple tree and two kinds of cherry trees, black and Royal Anne, and, something very special for Seattle, my grandmother’s favorite, an apricot tree. At Christmas, we had our own holly, cut from a tree in the front yard; the idea that this was better than other holly persisted in my grandmother’s mind until the very end, for every year until she died, a box would arrive for me, just before Christmas, in New England, from Seattle, packed full of holly from the Preston tree. My grandmother’s gardening was a distinguished, personal thing; she never joined a garden club or pored over seed catalogues, or exchanged slips or compared notes with other gardeners. Every morning after breakfast, she gave directions to the old gardener, descending from the back porch in a straw farmer’s hat and a smock, with a basket over her arm, to pick flowers for the day’s bouquets and supervise the new asparagus bed he was laying out or the planting of the new variety of sweet corn they were trying.