Mary McCarthy's Collected Memoirs: Memories of a Catholic Girlhood, How I Grew, and Intellectual Memoirs (30 page)

Children generally feel this about any adult emotion which is beyond their ken, but in this case I think I was on the track of something real. My grandmother’s grief had taken a form peculiar to herself, stamped, as it were, with her monogram—the severe “AMP,” in scroll lettering, that figured on her silver, her brushes and combs, her automobile. Her grief had the character of an inveterate hostility. One of my mother’s friends recently wrote me a letter describing how my grandmother had hurt her feelings by refusing to speak to her whenever they met in the stores for a year after my mother’s death. “Your grandmother could not bear the sight of me,” she sadly decided.

And that is how I see my grandmother, bearing her loss like an affront, stubborn and angry, refusing to speak not only to individual persons but to life itself, which had wounded her by taking her daughter away. Her grief was a kind of pique, one of those nurtured
grievances
in which she specialized and which were deeply related to her coquetry. If I had only her photographs to go on, I might doubt the legend of her beauty; what confirms it for me is her manner of grieving, her mistrust of words, her refusal to listen to explanations from life or any other guilty suitor. Life itself was obliged to court her—in vain, as it appeared, for she had been mortally offended, once, twice, three times.

What the first offense was, I do not know, but I imagine it had something to do with her Jewish pride and sensitiveness; some injury was dealt her early in her marriage, and it may have been a very small thing—a chance word, even—that caused her to draw back into an august silence on this topic, a silence that lasted until her death. The second one I know about. This was the tragic face lifting that took place, in 1916 or 1917, I imagine, when she was in her forties and my mother was still living. Perhaps she really did have a mastoid operation at some later period (I rather think she must have), but the pouchy disfiguring scars I have spoken of that started on her cheeks and went down into her neck were the work of a face-lifter, who, as I understand the story, had pumped her face full of hot wax.

Such accidents were common in the early days of face lifting, and the scars, by the time she was sixty, were not especially noticeable. It was only that her cheeks had a puffy, swollen appearance, which her make-up did not conceal—in fact, if anything, enhanced, for though she did not know it, she always looked better in the morning, before she put on the rouge and the powder that made her skin’s surface conspicuous. But when the scars were new, they must have been rather horrifying, and that was surely the reason for the dotted veils she wore, pulled tight across her face. The photographs break off at the time of the operation. That was when she stopped speaking to the camera, and, according to one informant, my grandmother left Seattle for a year after the tragedy.

“According to one informant”—the story of the face lifting was well known in Seattle, and yet in the family no mention was ever made of it, at least in my hearing, so that I learned of it from outsiders—my father’s people, friends of my mother’s, who naturally were unable to supply all the details. I was grown up when I learned it, and yet that same unnatural tact that kept me from ever using the word “Jewish” to my grandmother kept me from prying into the matter with the family. “Your grandmother’s tragedy”—so I first heard the face lifting alluded to, if I remember rightly, by one of my friends, who had heard of it from her mother. And I will not query the appropriateness of the term according to the Aristotelian canon; in this case, common usage seems right. It was a tragedy, for her, for her husband and family, who, deprived of her beauty through an act of folly, came to live in silence, like a house accursed.

My grandmother’s withdrawal from society must have dated, really, from this period, and not from the time of my mother’s death, which came as the crowning blow. That was why we were so peculiar, so unsocial, so, I would add, slightly inhuman; we were all devoting ourselves, literally, to the cult of a relic, which was my grandmother’s body, laved and freshened every day in the big bathroom, and then paraded before the public in the downtown stores.

I was living in New York when my grandfather died, from a stroke, one morning, when he was seventy-nine, in the big bathroom. My grandmother’s ritual did not change. She still dressed and went downtown at the same hours, returning at the time when she would have picked him up at his club. She was cheerful when I saw her, a year or so after this; she went to the races and had a new interest—night baseball; we went to the ball park together. Once in a great while, she would lunch and play bridge with a group of women friends, with whom she had resumed connections after twenty years. But she did not, to my knowledge, ever have them to her house; they met at the Seattle Golf Club usually, the best (non-Jewish) country club.

Like many widows, she appeared to have taken a new lease on life; I had never seen her so chatty, and she was looking very handsome. I remember an afternoon at the races, to which she drove Aunt Rosie and me in her car, at a speed of seventy miles an hour; she herself was well over seventy. The two sisters, one a lively robin and the other a brilliant toucan, chaffed and bantered with the sporting set in the clubhouse. Conscious of their powers and their desirability, they were plainly holding court. Aunt Rosie did not bet but advised us; my grandmother, as usual, won, and I think I won, too. That night, or in the small hours of the morning, Aunt Rosie died.

It was something, Dr. Sharpies thought, that she had eaten at the races; an attack of indigestion caused a heart block. He believed at first he could save her, and I had persuaded my grandmother to go to bed, confident that Aunt Rosie would be almost herself the next day. But in the middle of the night, the phone rang. I ran to get it; it was Uncle Mose. “Rosie just went.” My grandmother understood before I could tell her, before I had set down the telephone. A terrible scream—an unearthly scream—came from behind the closed door of her bedroom; I have never heard such a sound, neither animal nor human, and it did not stop. It went on and on, like a fire siren on the moon. In a minute, the whole household was roused; everybody came running. I got there first. Flinging open her bedroom door (even then with a sense of trepidation, of being an unwarranted intruder), I saw her, on her bed, the covers pushed back; her legs were sprawled out, and her yellow batiste nightgown, trimmed with white lace, was pulled up, revealing her thighs. She was writhing on the bed; the cook and I could barely get hold of her. My uncle appeared in the doorway, and my first thought (and I think the cook’s also) was to get that nightgown down. The spectacle was indecent, and yet of a strange boudoir beauty that contrasted in an eerie way with that awful noise she was making, more like a howl than a scream and bearing no resemblance to sorrow. She was trying, we saw, to pull herself to her feet, to go somewhere or other, and the cook helped her up. But then, all at once, she became heavy, like a sack full of stones. The screaming stopped, and there was dead silence.

Eventually, I forget how, but thanks chiefly to the cook, we got her calmed down to the point where she was crying normally. Perhaps the doctor came and administered a sedative. I sat up with her, embracing her and trying to console her, and there was something sweet about this process, for it was the first time we had ever been close to each other. But all at once she would remember Rosie and shriek out her name; no one could take Rosie’s place, and we both knew it. I felt like an utter outsider. It seemed clear to me that night, as I sat stroking her hair, that she had never really cared for anyone but her sister; that was her secret. The intellectual part of my mind was aware that some sort of revelation had taken place—of the nature of Jewish family feeling, possibly. And I wondered whether that fearful insensate noise had been classic Jewish mourning, going back to the waters of Babylon. Of one thing I was certain: my grandmother was more different from the rest of us than I could ever have conceived.

Uncle Mose was taking it well, I learned the next morning. It was only my grandmother, so unemotional normally, who had given way to this extravagant grief, and the family, I gathered, were slightly embarrassed by her conduct, as though they, too, felt that she had revealed something, which, as far as they were concerned, would have been better left in the dark. But what
had
she revealed, as they saw it? Her essential Jewishness? I could never find out, for I had to take the train east that very day, with my baby, and when I came back several years later, no one seemed to remember anything unusual about the occasion of Aunt Rosie’s death.

“That’s my sister,” my grandmother would exclaim, eagerly pointing when we came to a photograph of Aunt Rosie. “My sister,” she would say of Aunt Eva, in a somewhat grander tone. She always brightened when one of her two sisters turned up in the photograph collection, like a child when it is shown its favorite stuffed animal. I think she was a little more excited at the sight of Aunt Rosie. By that time, I imagine, she had forgotten that her sisters were dead, or, rather, the concept, death, no longer had any meaning for her; they had “gone away,” she probably believed, just as children believe that this is what happens to their dead relations. I used to stand ready to prompt her with the names, but she did not seem to need or want this; her sisters’ relationship to her was what mattered, and she always got that straight. “Aunt Rosie,” I would observe, showing her a picture of a small, smiling, dark woman in a big marabou hat. “My sister,” her voice would override me proudly, as if she were emending my statement.

The clothes in the old photographs amused her; she had not lost her interest in dress, and was very critical of my appearance, urging me, with impatient gestures, to pull my hair forward on my cheeks and surveying me with pride when I had done so; it gave a “softer” look. If I did not get it right, she would pull her own black waves forward, to show me what she meant. Though she could no longer go downtown, she still kept to the same schedule. Every day at twelve o’clock, the nurse would close my grandmother’s door and the doors to the nursery and the bathroom, reopening them between two and three, when the beauty preparations had been completed. “You can come in now. Your grandmother is all prettied up.” One afternoon, responding to the summons, I found my grandmother frowning and preoccupied. There was something the matter, and I could not make out what it was. She wanted me to get her something, the “whatchamacallit” from her bureau. I tried nearly everything—brush, comb, handkerchief, perfume, pincushion, pocketbook, photograph of my mother. All of them were wrong, and she grew more and more impatient, as if I were behaving like an imbecile. “Not the
comb
; the whachamacallit!” Finally, for she was getting quite wrought up, I rang for the nurse. “She wants something,” I said. “But I can’t make out what it is.” The nurse glanced at the bureau top and then went swiftly over to the chiffonier; she picked up the hand mirror that was lying there and passed it silently to my grandmother, who at once began to beam and nod. “She’s forgotten the word for mirror,” the nurse said, winking at me. At that moment, the fact that my grandmother was senile became real to me.

Image Gallery

Roy McCarthy and Tess Preston—engagement period

Parents, again, before and after marriage