Memories of a Catholic Girlhood

Mary McCarthy

• Publisher: Open Road Media
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781480441255
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Science Biographies
• Index: Social Sciences

Tracing her moral struggles to the day she accidentally took a sip of water before her Communion—a mortal sin—Mary McCarthy gives us eight funny and heartrending essays about the illusive and redemptive nature of memory
" During the course of writing this, I've often wished that I were writing fiction."
Originally published in large part as standalone essays in the  New Yorker and  Harper's Bazaar, Mary McCarthy's acclaimed memoir begins with her recollections of a happy childhood cut tragically short by the death of her parents during the influenza epidemic of 1918.
Tempering memory with invention, McCarthy describes how, orphaned at six, she spent much of her childhood shuttled between two sets of grandparents and three religions—Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish. One of four children, she suffered abuse at the hands of her great-aunt and uncle until she moved to Seattle to be raised by her maternal grandparents. Early on, McCarthy lets the reader in on her secret: The chapter you just read may not be wholly reliable—facts have been distilled through the hazy lens of time and distance.
In  Memories of a Catholic Girlhood, McCarthy pays homage to the past and creates hope for the future. Reminiscent of Nabokov's  Speak, Memory, this is a funny, honest, and unsparing account blessed with the holy sacraments of forgiveness, love, and redemption.
This ebook features an illustrated biography of Mary McCarthy including rare images from the author's estate.

Ask Me No Questions

THERE WAS SOMETHING STRANGE, abnormal, about my bringing-up; only now that my grandmother is dead am I prepared to face this fact. When she died, she had not divulged her age; none of her children knew it, and whatever figure they found in her papers has remained a secret to me. She was well over eighty, certainly, and senile when she finally “passed away,” three years ago, in her tall Seattle house—under her gold taffeta puff, doubtless, with her rings on her fingers and her blue-figured diamond wrist watch on her puckered wrist. Probably she herself no longer knew how old she was; she was confused the last time I saw her, six years ago, when I flew west to be with her after she had broken her hip. Going over family photographs, which we spread out on her bed, she nodded and smiled eagerly, sitting up among her pillows like a macaw on its perch, in her plumage of black hair and rouge and eyebrow pencil and mascara. She recognized the faces—her husband with a mustache, her husband clean-shaven, her son in a World War I uniform, her nephews, her younger son in a sailor suit, my mother dressed as a Spanish dancer, my mother in a ball gown—but she was vague about the names. “My father,” she decided after studying an obituary photograph of Grandpa, clipped out of a newspaper. “Son,” “husband,” and “father” were all one to her. She knew who I was, right enough, and did not mix me up with my dead mother, but this was not very flattering, since it was usually the people she had loved that she could not keep apart, melting them into a single category—father-son-husband—like the Mystery of the Trinity. One relation whom she had quarreled with she picked out instantly, while I was still fumbling for the name. “That’s Gertrude!” she proclaimed victoriously. Then she made a face—the same face she made when the cook brought her something she did not like on her tray. I reminded her that she had made up with Gertrude years ago, but she shook her head. “Bad,” she said childishly. “Gertrude said bad things about me.”

“You,” she said one day, suddenly pointing. “You wrote bad things about me. Bad.” It was not true; I had never written about her at all. But when I told her so, she would not listen, nor would she say where she had derived her notion. This was exactly like her; she collected stray grudges like bits of colored ribbon and would never tell where they came from. Nobody had ever known, for instance, the exact cause of her falling-out with Gertrude. Now, sitting by her bed, I tried to coax her into a better frame of mind. She turned her head away on the pillow and shut her eyes; long, sharp lines ran down, like rivulets of discontent, from her nose to the corners of her mouth. A hopeless silence followed. It troubled me to see her like this; those deep, bitter lines were new to me, yet it must have taken years to indent them. I did not know whether to leave or stay, and I wished the nurse would come in. “You wrote about my husband,” she abruptly charged, opening her eyes and frowning over her high-bridged nose. This was a sign that she was far away; in her clear moments, she spoke of him to me as “Grandpa.” “Yes,” I agreed. “I wrote about Grandpa.”

It transpired that this had made her very angry, though she had never alluded to it in any of her letters. But why, precisely, she was angry, I could not find out from her. Certainly I had not said anything that she could call “bad” about Grandpa. It occurred to me that she was jealous because she had not been included in these writings; moreover, my grandfather had been shown with other women—a Mother Superior, a fictional aunt, myself. When she accused me of putting her in, did she really mean that she felt left out? She was capable of such a contradiction even before her mind had clouded. Or did she suppose that she was the aunt—a disagreeable personage? Hopeless, hopeless, I repeated to myself. It had always been like this. You could never explain anything to her or make her see you loved her. She rebuffed explanations, as she rebuffed shows of affection; they intruded on her privacy, that closely guarded preserve—as sacrosanct as her bureau drawers or the safe with a combination lock in her closet—in which she clung to her own opinion. “Look, Grandma,” I began, but then I gave it up.

I was going to say that (a) I had not written about her in any shape or disguise, and (b) if I had not, it was not because I considered her unimportant but because I knew she would hate to have her likeness taken. For nearly forty years, she had refused to be photographed. The last picture made of her, a tinted photograph, stood on her chiffonier; it showed an imperious, handsome matron in a low-cut beaded evening dress and a gauzy scarf, with her hair in a pompadour and her young son at her knee. This remained her official image, and nothing would persuade her to let it be superseded. In the four-generations pictures made when my brothers and I were children—my great-grandfather, my grandfather, my mother, and the babies—my grandmother is absent. The last time I had come to visit her, with my own baby, I had begged her to let us take pictures of this new family group. But she would not allow it. In the snapshots I have of that summer, in 1939, just before the war, my grandmother again is absent; a shadow on the lawn, near the playpen, in one of them may indicate where she was standing. Yet I dared not draw these facts to her attention, for there was a story behind them, the story of her life—a story that was kept, like her age, a secret from those closest to her, though we all guessed at it and knew it in a general way, just as we all knew, in a general way, calculating from our own ages and from the laws of Nature, that she had to be over eighty.

Starting to tell that story now, to publish it, so to speak, abroad, I feel a distinct uneasiness, as though her shade were interposing to forbid me. If I believed in the afterlife, I would hold my peace. I should not like to account to her in whatever place we might meet—Limbo is where I can best imagine her, waiting for me at some stairhead with folded arms and cold cream on her face, as she used to wait in her pink quilted Japanese bathrobe or the green one with the dragons when I turned my key softly in the front door at two or three in the morning, with a lie, which I hoped not to need, trembling on my lips. She would never forgive me for what I am about to do, and if there is an afterlife, it is God who will have to listen to my explanations.

My first recollection of her is in her grey electric, her smartly gloved hands on the steering bar or tiller. How old I was, I am not sure, but it was before my family left Seattle when I was six. The grey box would glide up to the curb in front of our brick house on Twenty-fourth Avenue, and we would see her step out, wearing a dressy suit, braided or spangled, and a hat with a dotted veil that was pulled tight over her high-bridged nose, so that the black furry dots against her skin looked like beauty patches. On her feet, over her shoes, were curious cloth covers fastened with pearl buttons; my father said they were called “spats” and that some men wore them, too. She had come to see my mother, and smelled of perfume. The electric would be parked for a long time outside our house; one day, my brothers and I climbed in and got it started rolling. My mother spanked us with her tortoise-shell comb, but my father boasted of the exploit. “How did the little tykes do it?” he would say, laughing; we must all have been well under six.

Next, I think I see her in our bathroom, telling my mother that we must each have our own towel with our name above it, so that we would not keep catching colds from each other. When she left, that afternoon, there was a brand-new towel for each of us hanging folded on the towel rack, with our names written out on a little label pasted on the wall behind each towel: “Roy” and “Tess” for our parents, and “Mary,” “Kevin,” and “James Preston” for us; my little brother Sheridan was too young to have one. I was impressed by this arrangement, which seemed to me very stylish. But the very next day my father spoiled it by using one of our towels, and soon they were all scrambled up again and the labels fell off. This was the first (and, I think, the only) time I felt critical of my debonair father, for I knew the strange lady would be cross with him if she could see our bathroom now.

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, beca...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• To the Reader
• Yonder Peasant, Who Is He?
• A Tin Butterfly
• The Blackguard
• C'est le Premier Pas Qui Coûte
• Names
• The Figures in the Clock
• Yellowstone Park
• Ask Me No Questions
• Image Gallery
• A Biography of Mary McCarthy
• Copyright