Memories of a Catholic Girlhood Read online

  My last clear personal recollection of my father is one of sitting beside him on that train trip and looking out the window at the Rocky Mountains. All the rest of the party, as my memory sees it, are lying sick in bed in their compartments or drawing rooms, and I am feeling proud of the fact that my father and I, alone and still well, are riding upright in the Pullman car. As we look up at the mountains, my father tells me that big boulders sometimes fall off them, hitting the train and killing people. Listening, I start to shake and my teeth to chatter with what I think is terror but what turns out to be the flu. How vivid all this is in my mind! Yet my Uncle Harry says that it was he, not my father, who was sitting with me. Far from being the last, my father was the first to fall ill. Nor does Uncle Harry recall talking about boulders.

  It is the case of the gold watch, all over again. Yet how could I have mistaken my uncle for my father?

  “My mother is a Child of Mary,” I used to tell other children, in the same bragging spirit that I spoke of my father’s height. My mother, not long after her marriage, was converted to Catholicism and though I did not know what a Child of Mary was (actually a member of a sodality of the Ladies of the Sacred Heart), I knew it was something wonderful from the way my mother spoke of it. She was proud and happy to be a convert, and her attitude made us feel that it was a special treat to be a Catholic, the crowning treat and privilege. Our religion was a present to us from God. Everything in our home life conspired to fix in our minds the idea that we were very precious little persons, precious to our parents and to God, too, Who was listening to us with loving attention every night when we said our prayers. “It gave you a basic complaisancy,” a psychoanalyst once told me (I think he meant “complacency”), but I do not recall feeling smug, exactly. It was, rather, a sense of wondering, grateful privilege. Later, we heard a great deal about having been spoiled by our parents, yet we lacked that discontent that is the real mark of the spoiled child, to us, our existence was perfect, just the way it was.

  My parents’ death was brought about by a decision on the part of the McCarthy family. They concluded—and who can blame them?—that the continual drain of money, and my father’s monthly appeals for more, had to stop. It was decided that our family should be moved to Minneapolis, where my grandfather and grandmother could keep an eye on what was happening and try to curb my father’s expenditures.

  At this point, I must mention a thing that was told me, only a few years ago, by my uncle Harry, my father’s younger brother. My father, he confided, was a periodical drunkard who had been a family problem from the time of his late teens. Before his marriage, while he was still in Minnesota, a series of trained nurses had been hired to watch over him and keep him off the bottle. But, like all drunkards, he was extremely cunning and persuasive. He eluded his nurses or took them with him (he had a weakness for women, too) on a series of wild bouts that would end, days or weeks later, in some strange Middle Western city where he was hiding. A trail of bad checks would lead the family to recapture him. Or a telegram for money would eventually reveal his whereabouts, though if any money was sent him, he was likely to bolt away again. The nurses having proved ineffective, Uncle Harry was summoned home from Yale to look after him, but my father evaded him also. In the end, the family could no longer handle him, and he was sent out West as a bad job. That was how he came to meet my mother.

  I have no idea whether this story is true or not. Nor will I ever know. To me, it seems improbable, for I am as certain as one can be that my father did not drink when I was a little girl. Children are sensitive to such things, their sense of smell, first of all, seems sharper than other people’s, and they do not like the smell of alcohol. They are also quick to notice when anything is wrong in a household. I do recall my father’s trying to make some homemade wine (this must have been just before Prohibition was enacted) out of some grayish-purple bricks that had been sold him as essence of grape. The experiment was a failure, and he and my mother and their friends did a good deal of laughing about “Roy’s wine.” But if my father had been a dangerous drinker, my mother would not have laughed. Moreover, if he was a drinker, my mother’s family seem not to have known it. I asked my mother’s brother whether Uncle Harry’s story could possibly be true. His answer was that it was news to him. It is just possible, of course, that my father reformed after his marriage, which would explain why my mother’s family did not know of his habits, though as Uncle Harry pointed out, rather belligerently: “you would think they could have looked up their future son-in-law’s history.” Periodical drunkards, however, almost never reform, and if they do, they cannot touch wine. It remains a mystery, an eerie and troubling one. Could my father have been drinking heavily when he came home with those red roses, for my mother, in his arms? It is a drunkard’s appeasing gesture, certainly, lordly and off-balance. Was that why my mother said, “Oh, Roy!”?

  If my father was a sort of remittance man, sent out West by his family, it would justify the McCarthys, which was, of course, Uncle Harry’s motive in telling me. He felt I had defamed his mother, and he wanted me to understand that, from where she sat, my father’s imprudent marriage was the last straw. Indeed, from the McCarthy point of view, as given by Uncle Harry, my father’s marriage was just another drunkard’s dodge for extracting money from his father, all other means having failed. My mother, “your lovely mother,” as Uncle Harry always calls her, was the innocent lure on the hook. Perhaps so. But I refuse to believe it. Uncle Harry’s derelict brother, Roy, is not the same person as my father. I simply do not recognize him.

  Uncle Harry was an old man, and rather far gone in his cups himself, when he made these charges, which does not affect the point, however—in fact, might go to substantiate it. An uncanny resemblance to my father had come out in him with age, a resemblance that had not existed when he was young: his white hair stood up in a pompadour, and he had the same gray-green, electric eyes and the same animal magnetism. As a young man, Uncle Harry was the white hope of the family, the boy who went east to school, to Andover and Yale, and made a million dollars before he was thirty. It was in this capacity, of budding millionaire and family impresario, that he entrained for Seattle, in 1918, together with his pretty, social wife, my aunt Zula, to superintend our move to Minneapolis. They put up at the New Washington Hotel, the best hotel in those days, and, as my grandmother Preston told it, they brought the flu with them.

  We were staying at the hotel, too, since our house had been vacated—a very unwise thing, for the first rule in an epidemic is to avoid public places. Indeed, the whole idea of traveling with a sick man and four small children at the height of an epidemic seems madness, but I see why the risk was taken from an old Seattle newspaper clipping, preserved by my great-grandfather Preston: “The party left for the East at this particular time in order to see another brother, Lewis McCarthy [Louis], who is in the aviation service and had a furlough home.” This was the last, no doubt, of my father’s headstrong whims. I remember the grave atmosphere in our hotel suite the night before we took the train. Aunt Zula and the baby were both sick, by this time, as I recall it, and all the adults looked worried and uncertain. Nevertheless, we went ahead, boarding the train on a Wednesday, October 30. A week later, my mother died in Minneapolis, my father survived her by a day. She was twenty-nine; he was thirty-nine (a nice difference in age, my grandmother always said).

  I sometimes wonder what I would have been like now if Uncle Harry and Aunt Zula had not come on, if the journey had never been undertaken. My father, of course, might have died anyway, and my mother would have brought us up. If they had both lived, we would have been a united Catholic family, rather middle class and wholesome. I would probably be a Child of Mary. I can see myself married to an Irish lawyer and playing golf and bridge, making occasional retreats and subscribing to a Catholic Book Club. I suspect I would be rather stout. And my brother Kevin—would he be an actor today? The fact is, Kevin and I are the only members of the present generation of our family
who have done anything out of the ordinary, and our relations at least profess to envy us, while I do not envy them. Was it a good thing, then, that our parents were “taken away,” as if by some higher design? Some of my relations philosophize to this effect, in a somewhat Panglossian style. I do not know myself.

  Possibly artistic talent was already dormant in our heredity and would have come out in any case. What I recall best about myself as a child under six is a passionate love of beauty, which was almost a kind of violence. I used to get cross with my mother when she screwed her hair up on top of her head in the mornings; I could not bear that she should not be beautiful all the time. My only criterion for judging candidates who presented themselves to be our nursemaids was good looks, I remember importuning my mother, when I was about five, to hire one called Harriet—I liked her name, too—and how the world, for the first time, seemed to me cruel and inexplicable, when Harriet, who had been engaged, never materialized. She must have had a bad character, my mother said, but I could not accept the idea that anyone beautiful could be bad. Or rather, “bad” seemed to me irrelevant when put beside beauty, just as the faithful Gertrude’s red warts and her ugly name made me deaf to anything alleged to me about her kindness. One of the great shocks connected with the loss of my parents was an aesthetic one, even if my guardians had been nice, I should probably not have liked them because they were so unpleasing to look at and their grammar and accents were so lacking in correctness. I had been rudely set down in a place where beauty was not a value at all. “Handsome is as handsome does,” my grandmother McCarthy’s chauffeur, Frank, observed darkly, when my uncle Louis married an auburn-haired charmer from New Orleans. I hated him for saying it; it was one of those cunning remarks that throw cold water on life.

  The people I was forced to live with in Minneapolis had a positive gift for turning everything sour and ugly. Even our flowers were hideous: we had golden glow and sickly nasturtiums in our yard. I remember one Good Friday planting sweet peas for myself next to the house, and I believe they actually blossomed—a personal triumph. I had not been an especially pretty child (my own looks were one of my few early disappointments), but, between them, my guardians and my grandmother McCarthy turned me into such a scarecrow that I could not look at myself in the mirror without despair. The reader will see in the photographs that follow the transformation effected in me. It was not only the braces and the glasses but a general leanness and sallowness and lankness.

  Looking back, I see that it was religion that saved me. Our ugly church and parochial school provided me with my only aesthetic outlet, in the words of the Mass and the litanies and the old Latin hymns, in the Easter lilies around the altar, rosaries, ornamented prayer books, votive lamps, holy cards stamped in gold and decorated with flower wreaths and a saint’s picture. This side of Catholicism, much of it cheapened and debased by mass production, was for me, nevertheless, the equivalent of Gothic cathedrals and illuminated manuscripts and mystery plays. I threw myself into it with ardor, this sensuous life, and when I was not dreaming that I was going to grow up to marry the pretender to the throne of France and win back his crown with him, I was dreaming of being a Carmelite nun, cloistered and penitential; I was also much attracted by an order for fallen women called the Magdalens. Λ desire to excel governed all my thoughts, and this was quickened, if possible, by the parochial-school methods of education, which were based on the competitive principle. Everything was a contest, our schoolroom was divided into teams, with captains, for spelling bees and other feats of learning, and on the playground we organized ourselves in the same fashion. To win, to skip a grade, to get ahead—the nuns’ methods were well adapted to the place and time, for most of the little Catholics of our neighborhood were children of poor immigrants, bent on bettering themselves and also on surpassing the Protestants, whose children went to Whittier, the public school. There was no idea of equality in the parochial school, and such an idea would have been abhorrent to me, if it had existed; equality, a sort of brutal cutting down to size, was what I was treated to at home. Equality was a species of unfairness which the good sisters of St. Joseph would not have tolerated.

  I stood at the head of my class and I was also the best runner and the best performer on the turning poles in the schoolyard, I was the best actress and elocutionist and the second most devout, being surpassed in this by a blond boy with a face like a saint, who sat in front of me and whom I loved, his name, which sounds rather like a Polish saint’s name, was John Klosick. No doubt, the standards of the school were not very high, and they gave me a false idea of myself; I have never excelled at athletics elsewhere. Nor have I ever been devout again. When I left the competitive atmosphere of the parochial school, my religion withered on the stalk.

  But in St. Stephen’s School, I was not devout just to show off, I felt my religion very intensely and longed to serve God better than anyone else. This, I thought, was what He asked of me. I lived in fear of making a poor confession or of not getting my tongue flat enough to receive the Host reverently. One of the great moral crises of my life occurred on the morning of my first Communion. I took a drink of water. Unthinkingly, of course, for had it not been drilled into me that the Host must be received fasting, on the penalty of mortal sin? It was only a sip, but that made no difference, I knew. A sip was as bad as a gallon, I could not take Communion. And yet I had to. My Communion dress and veil and prayer book were laid out for me, and I was supposed to lead the girls’ procession, John Klosick, in a white suit, would be leading the boys’. It seemed to me that I would be failing the school and my class, if, after all the rehearsals, I had to confess what I had done and drop out. The sisters would be angry; my guardians would be angry, having paid for the dress and veil. I thought of the procession without me in it, and I could not bear it. To make my first Communion later, in ordinary clothes, would not be the same. On the other hand, if I took my first Communion in a state of mortal sin, God would never forgive me; it would be a fatal beginning. I went through a ferocious struggle with my conscience, and all the while, I think, I knew the devil was going to prevail: I was going to take Communion, and only God and I would know the real facts. So it came about: I received my first Communion in a state of outward holiness and inward horror, believing I was damned, for I could not imagine that I could make a true repentance—the time to repent was now, before committing the sacrilege; afterward, I could not be really sorry for I would have achieved what I had wanted.

  I suppose I must have confessed this at my next confession, scarcely daring to breathe it, and the priest must have treated it lightly: my sins, as I slowly discovered, weighed heavier on me than they did on my confessors. Actually, it is quite common for children making their first Communion to have just such a mishap as mine: they are so excited on that long-awaited morning that they hardly know what they are doing, or possibly the very taboo on food and water and the importance of the occasion drive them into an unconscious resistance. I heard a story almost identical with mine from Ignazio Silone. Yet the despair I felt that summer morning (I think it was Corpus Christi Day) was in a certain sense fully justified: I knew myself, how I was and would be forever; such dry self-knowledge is terrible. Every subsequent moral crisis of my life, moreover, has had precisely the pattern of this struggle over the first Communion; I have battled, usually without avail, against a temptation to do something which only I knew was bad, being swept on by a need to preserve outward appearances and to live up to other people’s expectations of me. The heroine of one of my novels, who finds herself pregnant, possibly as the result of an infidelity, and is tempted to have the baby and say nothing to her husband, is in the same fix, morally, as I was at eight years old, with that drink of water inside me that only I knew was there. When I supposed I was damned, I was right—damned, that is, to a repetition or endless re-enactment of that conflict between excited scruples and inertia of will.

  I am often asked whether I retain anything of my Catholic heritage. This is hard to a
nswer, partly because my Catholic heritage consists of two distinct strains. There was the Catholicism I learned from my mother and from the simple parish priests and nuns in Minneapolis, which was, on the whole, a religion of beauty and goodness, however imperfectly realized. Then there was the Catholicism practiced in my grandmother McCarthy’s parlor and in the home that was made for us down the street—a sour, baleful doctrine in which old hates and rancors had been stewing for generations, with ignorance proudly stirring the pot. The difference can be illustrated by an incident that took place when I stopped off in Minneapolis, on my way to Vassar as a freshman, in 1929. In honor of the occasion, my grandmother McCarthy invited the parish priest to her house; she wanted him to back up her opinion that Vassar was “a den of iniquity.” The old priest, Father Cullen, declined to comply with her wishes and, ignoring his pewholder’s angry interjections, spoke to me instead of the rare intellectual opportunities Vassar had in store for me.

  Possibly Father Cullen was merely more tactful than his parishioner, but I cannot forget my gratitude to him. It was not only that he took my grandmother down a peg. He showed largeness of spirit—a quality rare among Catholics, at least in my experience, though false magnanimity is a common stock in trade with them. I have sometimes thought that Catholicism is a religion not suited to the laity, or not suited, at any rate, to the American laity, in whom it seems to bring out some of the worst traits in human nature and to lend them a sort of sanctification. In the course of publishing these memoirs in magazines, I have received a great many letters from the laity and also from priests and nuns. The letters from the laity—chiefly women—are all alike, they might almost have been penned by the same person; I have filed them under the head of “Correspondence, Scurrilous.” They are frequently full of misspellings, though the writers claim to be educated; and they are all, without exception, menacing. “False,” “misrepresentation,” “lying,” “bigotry,” “hate,” “poison,” “filth,” “trash,” “cheap,” “distortion”—this is the common vocabulary of them all. They threaten to cancel their subscriptions to the magazine that published the memoir; they speak of a “great many other people that you ought to know feel as I do,” i.e., they attempt to constitute themselves a pressure group. Some demand an answer. One lady writes: “I am under the impression that the Law forbids this sort of thing.”