The interviews between my grandfather and Madame MacIllvra came to an end. To that remarkable marriage of minds the impediment had at last been discovered. But from this time on, Madame Barclay’s marks of favor to me grew steadily more distinct, while the look of suffering tightened on her face, till some said she had cancer (a theory supported by the yellowness of her skin) and some said she was being poisoned by an antipathy to the Mother Superior.
This account is highly fictionalized. A Jesuit did preach such a sermon, and I really became concerned for my grandfather’s soul; I was still very devout, in a childish way, and extremely suggestible. I suppose I was still “nervous” as a result of my Minneapolis experiences. I did take the problem to the Acting Mother Superior, who was finally able to reassure me with the promise that my grandfather could be saved if he did not know the Catholic Church was the true Church. This was “invincible ignorance.” The nun I call Madame Barclay did tell me I was like Byron, brilliant but unsound. But what provoked her to say it, I don’t remember. And I did tell my grandfather, and he did demand an apology from the Acting Mother Superior, which made me utterly furious. In short, the story is true in substance, but the details have been invented or guessed at.
“My grandfather,” I say, “reduced his prospects of salvation every time he sat down in the Presbyterian church.” He cannot have reduced them very greatly, since I do not recall his ever attending church, except for weddings and funerals. But when I asked him what his religion was, he said he was a Presbyterian. I was the only churchgoer in the family, every Sunday the car took me to Mass and brought me home again. When I left Minneapolis, my grandmother McCarthy had supplied me with some works of Catholic propaganda which she instructed me to leave about the house, in the hope of effecting a conversion. But I soon saw this was out of the question. The reader may wonder why the priest’s sermon did not cause me to worry about my grandmother Preston, too. The answer is simple; she was Jewish. In other words, she had not been baptized.
This technical point about baptism was what I had seized on in the priest’s sermon. Possibly he had touched only incidentally on Protestants, but in doing so he had riveted my attention. His theme may have been that the sacrament of Baptism was at once wonderful and dangerous; it conferred duties as well as privileges. Only a baptized person could be saved, but if such a person (e.g., a Protestant) refused to avail himself of the grace conferred by the sacrament, he could be damned simply for that. I knew, of course, that anyone—i.e., anyone who had been baptized—could be saved, no matter what he had done or left undone, by reciting an Act of Contrition in his last moments. But my grandfather did not know the Act of Contrition: “Oh, my God, I am heartily sorry for having offended Thee, through my fault, through my fault, through my most grievous fault ...”
True repentance would doubtless have sufficed, but as a child I thought you would have to start saying the Act itself as rapidly as possible if you were hit, say, by an automobile while in a state of mortal sin. Great stress was laid on the prescribed forms by the priests and nuns who taught us. I speak of “an improper baptism.” We had been studying about this in our Catechism class. Baptism was the only sacrament that could be administered by a lay person, could be administered, in fact, by anyone, providing it was done correctly and that the person had the intention to baptize. (You could not be baptized accidentally.) But if a mistake were made, if the prescribed form were not followed, the baptism did not “take.” Thus not all Protestant baptisms were recognized by the Church. I have forgotten many of the finer points, but I know it was essential to use water (ice would not do), and I remember our taking up such curiously hypothetical questions as: “If a Mohammedan administered baptism would it be valid?” The answer, I believe, would be: “Yes, providing it was done correctly, and that the Mohammedan had the intention of baptizing.”
In the Catholic Church, even the most remote eventualities are discussed with pedantic literalness. The question of what happens in the hereafter to Protestants who have lived a good life has been a common subject of debate in the Church, and different answers have been accepted as authoritative at different times and places. “Extra ecclesiam, nulla salus”—this was the Jesuit’s position, which was orthodox enough at the time, though it was not the only position that a priest in good standing could take. Not long ago, Father Feeney and a small circle of Boston Catholics were excommunicated for preaching that there was no salvation outside the Church, their reply was that it was they who were orthodox and that those who condemned them were in error. In recent years, and in Protestant countries, the Church has pulled in its horns. But in Spain, if I am not mistaken, “extra ecclesiam, nulla salus,” would be the accepted belief. Many Catholics have written to protest that such a sermon as I have described could not have been preached, I agree that it could not be preached here today—not since the Father Feeney case brought matters to a head. An American priest, however, would still be free to believe privately that Protestants are damned, good and bad alike.
As it happens, I remember the missionary priest very well because, before he went to work among the Eskimos, he had been the popular pastor of the white frame church I had gone to as a little girl, before the death of my parents. He was a very handsome, dark, greying man, who must have been about forty when he came to talk to us in the convent. I recall feeling that he had grown much rougher and blunter during his stay in the North. A priest like that blew into our convent like a rude wind. At some point, he preached a retreat for us. He was a forceful speaker, and he had the power, common to retreat preachers, of making his audience feel uneasy. Every word he uttered seemed to apply to me personally.
Toward the end of the retreat, he delivered us a sermon on unchastity that transfixed me in my seat, afterward, as I recall it, he offered to hear the confessions of any who were in special need. I signed up, or lined up, to confess to him; the sermon had made it clear to me (what I had not guessed before) that my soul was in a precarious state. This is the only one of all the confessions I made that I can remember almost verbatim. I knelt down in the confessional trembling with fear, “Father, I have committed a sin of impurity.” “How many times?” Three times, five times, I have forgotten the exact figure. “Was it with a boy?” This question startled me. “Oh, no, father.” “Was it with yourself or with another girl?” “Both, father.” The priest made a noise that sounded like a click of satisfaction. Then he settled back to draw out of me the details of what I had done, but I was so mortified that my admissions came very slowly. I had been looking up words like “breast” in the big school dictionary and in a medical book at home and discussing them with my fellow pupils. “You looked up these words in a book, you say, and talked to other girls about them?” “Yes, father.” “Is that all?” His voice sounded positively indignant. “Yes, father.” “You mean to tell me that this is your only sin of impurity?” “Yes.” Before I knew it, he had pronounced absolution, and the door of the confessional grate was shut almost with a bang, as though I had been imposing on his valuable time. This experience mystified and annoyed me; all through his sermon he had been dwelling on the terrible offense given to God by an impure thought. And what was it that he supposed I might have done with a boy? Or with myself or another girl, beyond what I had confessed ? My curiosity was awakened.
I must have been eleven at this time, and I now think I was eleven, not twelve, at the time of “The Blackguard.” In the next chapter, I am a year older, by the calendar, and though I am still suggestible, I have begun to exploit this quality and play, deliberately, to the gallery.
C’est le Premier Pas Qui Coûte
LIKE THE JESUITS, TO whom they stand as nieces, the Ladies of the Sacred Heart are a highly centralized order, versed in clockwork obedience to authority. Their institutions follow a pattern laid down for them in France in the early nineteenth century—clipped and pollarded as a garden and stately as a minuet. All Sacred Heart convent schools are the same—the same blue serge dresses, usually,
with white collars and cuffs, the same blue and green and pink moire ribbons awarded for good conduct, the same books given as prizes on Prize Day, the same recitation of “Lepanto” by an English actor in a piped vest, the same congés, or holidays, announced by the Mere Supérieure, the same game of cache-cache, or hide-and-seek, played on these traditional feast days, the same goûter, or tea, the same retreats and sermons, the same curtsies dipped in the hall, the same early-morning chapel with processions of girls, like widowed queens, in sad black-net veils, the same prie-dieu, the same French hymns (“Oui, je le crois”), the same glorious white-net veils and flowers and gold vessels on Easter and Holy Thursday and on feasts peculiar to the order. In the year I came to the Seattle Mesdames, at four o’clock on any weekday afternoon in Roscrea, Ireland, or Roehampton, England, or Menlo Park, California, the same tiny old whiskered nun was reading, no doubt, from Emma or A Tale of Two Cities to a long table of girls stitching French seams or embroidering bureau scarves with wreaths of flowers. “Charles Evrémonde, called Darnay!”—the red-rimmed old black eye leveled and raked us all, summarily, with the grapeshot of the Terror.
I was eleven years old, a seventh-grader, when I was first shown into the big study hall in Forest Ridge Convent and issued my soap dish, my veil, and my napkin ring. The sound of the French words awed me, the luster of the wide moire ribbons cutting, military-wise, across young bosoms, the curtained beds in the dormitories, the soft step of the girls, the curtsies to the floor, the white hands of the music master (a Swedish baron in spats), the cricket played in the playground, the wooden rattle of the surveillante’s clapper. I could not get used to the idea that here were nuns who did not lose their surnames, as all normal nuns did, becoming Sister Mary Aloysia or Sister Josepha, but were called Madame Barclay or Madame Slattery, or Ma Mère or Mother for short. They were not ordinary nuns, it was scornfully explained to me, but women of good family, cloistered ladies of the world, just as Sacred Heart girls were not ordinary Catholics but daughters of the best families. And my new subjects were not ordinary subjects, like spelling and arithmetic, but rhetoric, French, literature, Christian doctrine, English history. I was fresh from a Minneapolis parochial school, where a crude “citizenship” had been the rule, where we pledged allegiance to the flag every morning, warbled “My Country, ’Tis of Thee,” said “grievious” instead of “grievous,” competed in paper drives and citywide spelling contests, drew hatchets for Washington’s Birthday and log cabins for Lincoln’s, gave to foreign missions for our brown and yellow brothers, feared the Ku Klux Klan, sold chances and subscriptions to periodicals, were taken on tours of flour mills and water works; I looked upon my religion as a branch of civics and conformity, and the select Sacred Heart atmosphere took my breath away. The very austerities of our life had a mysterious aristocratic punctilio: the rule of silence so often clapped down on us at mealtimes, the pitcher of water and the bowl for washing at our bedsides, the supervised Saturday-night bath in the cold bathroom, with a red-faced nun sitting on a stool behind a drawn curtain with our bath towel in her lap. I felt as though I stood on the outskirts and observed the ritual of a cult, a cult of fashion and elegance in the sphere of religion.
And, thanks to the standardization of an archaic rule, the past still vibrated in the convent, a high, sweet note. It was the France of the Restoration that was embalmed in the Sacred Heart atmosphere, like a period room in a museum with a silken cord drawn across it. The quarrels of the philosophes still echoed in the classrooms; the tumbrils had just ceased to creak, and Voltaire grinned in the background. Orthodoxy had been re-established, Louis XVIII ruled, but there was a hint of Orleanism in the air and a whisper of reduced circumstances in the pick-pick of our needles doing fine darning and turning buttonholes. Byron’s great star had risen, and, across the sea, America beckoned in the romances of Chateaubriand and Fenimore Cooper and the adventures of the coureurs de bois. Protestantism did not trouble us; we had made our peace with the Huguenots. What we feared was skepticism, deism, and the dread spirit of atheism—France’s Lucifer. Monthly, in the study hall, the Mother Superior, Madame MacIllvra, adjured us, daughters of dentists and lawyers, grocers and realtors, heiresses of the Chevrolet agency and of Riley & Finn, contractors, against the sin of doubt, that curse of fine intellects. Her blue eyes clouded and her fair white brow ruffled under her snowy coif as she considered, with true feminine sympathy, the awful fate of Shelley, a young man of good family who had contracted atheism at Oxford.
These discourses of Madame MacIllvra’s fascinated me, peopling the world with new characters and a new sort of hero-villain, alone, noble, bereft; I watched the surge and billow of her bosom, and pulsed with pity and terror. During that first year, I was very unhappy in the convent, or, to be more accurate, I felt like a lorn new soul come to Paradise, elated and charmed by what I saw—by the ranging hierarchies, the thrones and dominions—but unable to get a nod from any of the angels as they brushed by me on errands of bliss. As a revelation of the aristocratic principle, the convent overwhelmed me. The beauty and poise of the middling and older girls were like nothing I had seen on earth. If not like angels, they were like the kings’ paramours I had read about in history or like Olympian goddesses, tall and swift of tread. Each of these paragons moved in an aureole of mysterious self-sufficiency; each had her pledged admirers among the younger and plainer girls, and disputes about them raged among us as though someone had thrown the apple of discord. In the intensity of the convent light, even a rather ordinary girl could acquire this penumbra of beauty, by gravity and dignity of person; it was a sort of calling, a still hearkening to inward voices, which brought a secret, cool smile to the lips of the one elected.
From the first, of course, I longed to become a member of this exquisite company, if only as a favored satellite or maid-in-waiting. But instead I stepped straight into that fatality that in every school awaits the newcomer who has not learned the first law of social dynamics: be suspicious of tenders of assistance. Around me, from the very first day, as I arranged my books in my desk, circled the rusty rejects of the school system, hungry as crows for friendship, copious with invitations, pointers, and sweets from home to be shared. Every school, every college, every office, every factory has its complement of these miserable creatures, of whom I was soon to be one. No doubt they exist in Heaven, just inside the gate, peering over Saint Peter’s shoulder for the advent of a new spirit, whom they can show the ropes; Hell must have them, too, and if I were Dante, for example, knowing what I know today, I would have been a little more leery of Vergil and that guided tour. In any case, I fell; I accepted with thanks those offers of aid and companionship. I learned the way to the refectory, how to fold my papers properly, how to stitch on my collars and cuffs, how to pin my veil, and, in return, I found myself the doomed companion of girls with flat, broad faces and huge collections of freckles, girls with dandruff on their uniforms, with spots and gaping seams, wrinkled black stockings, chilblains, owl-like glasses, carrot-colored hair—damp, confidential souls with quantities of younger brothers and sisters just like themselves. And I was one of them, too. On Saturday afternoons (we were all five-day boarders, which gave us “a lot in common”), I was the intimate of their mah-jongg parties, eating brick ice cream and frosted cupcakes, curtsying to their mothers, suspiciously hospitable dames with stout golfing legs who were pressing with second helpings, prizes, and “Didn’t I know your mother?” On Monday mornings, at recess, Nemesis exacted its price; we wretches all loyally “stuck together,” like pieces of melting candy in the linty recesses of a coat pocket. At the time, I thought I was alone in my impulses of savage withdrawal, but now I think that all of us, except those of subnormal mentality, bitterly hated each other and had each other’s measure.
I felt the shock of all this the more acutely because nothing had prepared me for it. I had come to the convent anticipating a ready acceptance—or, rather, not even anticipating it, so completely had I taken it for granted. In the parochi
al school, I had led the class in scholarship and athletics; the fact that I was an orphan and the strange circumstances of my home life, led between rich grandparents and a set of harsh, miserly guardians, had given me a unique social position. Waking up now sometimes in my cubicle at six-thirty in the morning to hear the nuns singing their office, far off in the chapel, I could look back, half unbelieving, to a time when the leading boys and girls in my classroom had positively vied for my favors. I thought of my confirmation, which had been the great event of 6A in St. Stephen’s School—what a stir it had made when it was known that Mary McCarthy, who was only ten years old, was going to be confirmed with the seventh- and eighth-graders. I remembered how my friends, full of curiosity and awe, had hung around outside the rectory one afternoon while I went in alone to tackle Father Gaughan, the old parish priest, and persuade him to confirm me, because I was such a prodigy of theological lore. In the dining room, next to the parlor, the priest’s housekeeper was rattling the dishes and making angry noises, to indicate that I should go, that the Father’s dinner was ready, as I could perfectly well smell for myself. Yet I had lingered, stubbornly, refusing to be put off, reciting passages from the catechism, till finally the old priest had patted my head and said to me, “Perseverance wins the crown,” and I had run out into the street, jubilating, to meet my amazed classmates. “Perseverance wins the crown, perseverance wins the crown,” I had sung over and over, just under my breath. This maxim and the triumph it capped fortified me now in the convent; I argued that it was only a question of time before I would be noticed by the superior girls with whom I rightfully belonged.
Memories of a Catholic Girlhood Page 10
