Memories of a Catholic Girlhood

by Mary McCarthy

  It was the idea of being noticed that consumed all my attention; the rest, it seemed to me, would come of itself. Those goddesses whose society I craved had only to look down, once, to discern among the seventh-graders one who was different from the rest of the speckled crew. The sprinkling of freckles across the bridge of my own turned-up nose I regarded as ornamental; I rather fancied myself as a burning tiger lily among the roses and Easter lilies and Parma violets of the school. But despite my haughty manner, my new jeweled barrettes, my week-end applications of cucumber cream, my studied insolence to my friends, nobody seemed able to distinguish me. Even those very friends, who ought, by this time, to have known better (for I could make them cry whenever I wanted to), treated me comfortably as one of themselves. Only the nuns recognized the difference, and this with a certain sorrow and gentle disapprobation. When I shaved off half my eyebrows, I was given a lecture on vanity, but within the convent no one was permitted to mention my extraordinary appearance. It was thought that I was getting ideas too old for my age, and my library list was examined; following the eyebrow episode, I was given a weekly dose of Fenimore Cooper as a corrective. When I finally refused this as childish, I was started on John L. Stoddard’s Lectures.

  Though I often stood first in my studies, the coveted pink ribbon for good conduct never came my way. I suppose this was because of my meanness, in particular the spiteful taunts I directed at a supercilious fat girl, the petted daughter of a rich meat packer, with heavy rings on her fingers and a real fur coat, who was my principal rival for honors in the classroom, but at the time I could not understand why the ribbon was denied me. I never broke any of the rules, and was it my fault if she blubbered when I applied, perfectly accurately, a term I had heard mothers whisper—nouveau riche? Wasn’t it true, I argued, when I was rebuked by Madame Barclay, our mistress of studies, and wasn’t fat Beryl always boasting of her money and curling her baby lip at girls whose mothers had to work? It wasn’t kind of me, replied Madame Barclay, but I did not think it kind of her when she passed me over for Beryl in casting the class play. Everyone could see that I was much the better actress, and the leading role of haughty Lady Spindle was precisely suited to my style. I did not believe Madame Barclay when she explained that in the tryout I sounded too fierce and angry for a comedy; the nuns in the parochial school had never said so. I could see, darkly, that I was being punished, with that inverted favoritism so typical of authority (“Whom the Lord loveth, He chastiseth”), for everyone detested Beryl, even the nuns. Up to the last moment, I could not think they would really do this to me; I knew the part by heart and practiced the lines privately against the time when they would recognize their error and send for me to rescue them. But, incredibly, the play went on without me, and my only satisfaction, as I sat in the audience, was to watch Pork Barrel forget her lines; I supplied them, to my neighbors, in a vindictive whisper, till somebody told me to hush.

  Nobody cared, apparently; nobody knew what they had missed; to them, it was just a silly seventh-grade play. My contempt for the seventh grade was stiffened by this experience; I resolved to cut myself off from them. At this time, for reasons of discipline, my desk in study hall was changed, and for the remainder of the term I was put next to an eighth-grader, the vivacious one of a pair of very popular twins; this girl was being punished for chattering with her former deskmate. The gulf between the grades was very wide, and it was reasoned, correctly, that she would have no incentive to repeat her sin with me. Yet the mistress of discipline who put us together must have had a taste for visual punning, for the strange fact was that this girl and I resembled each other far more startlingly than she resembled her studious sister. We had the same brows, the same noses, the same fair skin and dark hair, the same height; the only difference was in the way we parted our hair and in the color of our eyes, hers being hazel and mine green. Louise, unlike me, had a kind disposition but little curiosity, and even the likeness between us, so much remarked on by the nuns, was not enough to focus her merry eye on me for more than a wondering instant. As a twin, doubtless, she had grown indifferent to the oddities of Nature’s ways. In any case, she paid me no heed, and the very thing that might have drawn us together underlined the disparity between us. One day, as we sat side by side, bitterness overcame me to see her, my double, exchanging notes with her eighth-grade friends and acting as though I were not there. I took a piece of paper and wrote, “In my other school, I was popular too,” and shoved it over onto her desk. She read it and lifted her eyes with a look of quizzical astonishment. “Tell me,” she wrote back, and I replied with a dazzling essay on the friends I had had, the contests I had won, the boys who had had crushes on me. As I watched her read, I felt a tremendous satisfaction: I had at last got the facts on record. It had come to me, suddenly, that I was neglected because the convent did not know who I was. Once the truth was discovered, I would receive my due, like royalty traveling incognito when it is recognized by someone in the crowd and the whole populace falls on its knees. “It must be very hard,” she wrote back, sympathetically. And that, to my amazement, was the end of it. I had only made her vaguely sorry for me, so that she smiled at me from time to time, with looks of encouragement. I was forced to accept the fact that my former self was dead.

  But my resolve was not softened. I came back in the fall, as a full-time boarder, with a certain set to my jaw, determined to go it alone. A summer passed in thoughtful isolation, rowing on a mountain lake, diving from a pier, had made me perfectly reckless. I was going to get myself recognized at whatever price. It was in this cold, empty gambler’s mood, common to politicians and adolescents, that I surveyed the convent setup. If I could not win fame by goodness, I was ready to do it by badness, and I looked to the past for precedents. Anything that had happened once in a Sacred Heart convent became, so to speak, fossilized in the institutions of the order. Once, long ago, perhaps here or in Bruges or Chicago or nineteenth-century France, a girl had eloped with the music master, so now our piano lessons were chaperoned by a fat sister, one of the domestics, who reclined, snoring gently, in a chair just behind the Baron’s. For a few weeks during the fall, the prospect of an elopement held first claim on my thoughts. My twelve-year-old hands trembled with hope whenever, in the stretch of an octave, they grazed the white hands of the professor; he had a few little blond glinting hairs on his plump fingers, which seemed to hint of virility dormant but vibrato, like the sleeping nun. I grew faint when my laced shoe encountered his spatted Oxford on the loud pedal. Examples of child marriages among the feudal nobility crowded through my head, as if to encourage the Baron, but at length I had to bow to the force of American custom and face it: he probably thought I was too young.

  The decision to lose my faith followed swiftly on this disappointment. People are always asking me how I came to lose my faith, imagining a period of deep inward struggle. The truth is the whole momentous project simply jumped at me, ready-made, out of one of Madame MacIllvra’s discourses. I had decided to do it before I knew what it was, when it was merely an interweaving of words, lose-your-faith, like the ladder made of sheets on which the daring girl had descended into the arms of her Romeo. “Say you’ve lost your faith,” the devil prompted, assuring me that there was no risk if I chose my moment carefully. Starting Monday morning, we were going to have a retreat, to be preached by a stirring Jesuit. If I lost my faith on, say, Sunday, I could regain it during the three days of retreat, in time for Wednesday confessions. Thus there would be only four days in which my soul would be in danger if I should happen to die suddenly. The only real sacrifice would be forgoing Communion on Sunday. He who hesitates is lost; qui ne risque rien n’a rien, observed the devil, lapsing into French, as is his wont. If I did not do it, someone else might—that awful Beryl, for instance. It was a miracle that someone had not thought of it already, the idea seemed so obvious, like a store waiting to be robbed.

  Surprised looks were bent on me Sunday morning in the chapel when the line formed for Com
munion and I knelt unmoving in my pew. I was always an ostentatious communicant. Now girls clambered over me, somebody gave me a poke, but I shook my head sorrowfully, signifying by my expression that I was in a state of mortal sin and dared not approach the table. At lunch, eating little, I was already a center of attention at my table; I maintained a mournful silence, rehearsing what I would say to Madame MacIllvra in her office as soon as the meal was over. Having put in my request for an appointment, I was beginning to be slightly frightened. After lunch, as I stood waiting outside her door, I kept licking my lips. Yet this fear, I argued, was a token of sincerity; naturally you would be frightened if you had just lost your faith.

  “Ma Mère, I have lost my faith.” At her roll-top desk, Madame MacIllvra started; one plump white hand fluttered to her heart. She gave me a single searching look. Evidently, my high standing in my studies had prepared her for this catastrophe, for she did not ransack me further as I stood there quaking and bowing and trying to repress a foolish giveaway grin. I had been expecting a long questioning, but she reached, sighing, for the telephone, as though I had appendicitis or the measles.

  “Pray, my child,” she murmured as she summoned Father Dennis, our chaplain, from the neighboring Jesuit college. “I can’t pray,” I promptly responded. A classical symptom of unbelief was the inability to pray, as I knew from her own lectures. Madame MacIllvra nodded, turning a shade paler; she glanced at the watch in her bosom. “Go to your room,” she said perturbedly. “You are not to speak to anyone. You will be sent for when Father Dennis comes. I will pray for you myself.”

  Some of her alarm had communicated itself to me. I had not realized that what I had said was so serious. I felt quite frightened now by what I had done and by the prospect of a talk with Father Dennis, who was an old, dry, forbidding man, very different from the handsome missionary father who was going to preach our retreat. The idea of backing down presented itself with more and more attraction, but I did not see how I could do this without being convicted of shallowness. Moreover, I doubted very much that Madame MacIllvra would believe me if I said now that I had got my faith back all at once. She would make me talk to Father Dennis anyway. Once the convent machinery had got into motion, there was no way of stopping it, as I knew from horrendous experience. It was like the mills of the gods.

  By the time I reached my cubicle I was thoroughly scared. I saw that I was going to have to go through with this or be exposed before them all as a liar, and for the first time it occurred to me that I would have to have arguments to make my doubts sound real. At the same shaken moment I realized that I knew nothing whatever of atheism. If I were out in the world, I could consult the books that had been written on the subject, but here in the convent, obviously, there could be no access to atheistic literature. From the playground outside floated the voices of the girls, laughing. I went to the window and looked down at them, feeling utterly cut off and imprisoned within my own emptiness. There was no one to turn to but God, yet this was one occasion when prayer would be unavailing. A prayer for atheistic arguments (surely?) would only bring out the stern side of God. What was I going to do?

  I sat down on my bed and tried to count my resources. After all, I said to myself suddenly, I did know something about skepticism, thanks to Madame MacIllvra herself. The skeptics’ arguments were based on science—false science, said Madame MacIllvra—which reasoned that there was no God because you could not see Him. This was a silly materialistic “proof,” to which, unfortunately, I knew the answer. Could you see the wind? And yet its touch was everywhere, like God’s invisible grace blowing on our souls. Skeptics denied the life after death and said there was no Heaven, only the blue of space in the celestial vault. Science proved that, they said, and science proved, too, that there was no Hell burning under the earth. We had had the answer to that one, only last week in Christian Doctrine, in Saint Paul’s steely words, which we had had to memorize: “That eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither hath it entered into the heart of man, what things God hath prepared for them that love Him.” I sank into a dull despair. Was I going to have to offer “proofs” that any fool could see through? Any fool knew that man’s scientific calipers could not grasp God directly. Hell and Heaven were not contradictory to science but something different altogether, beyond science. But what about miracles?

  I sat up suddenly. Miracles were not invisible. They were supposed to happen right here on earth, today. They were attested in the photographs of Lourdes by all the crutches hanging up in token of thankfulness for cures. Nevertheless, I said to myself delightedly, I had never seen a miracle, and perhaps all these people were lying or deluded. Christian Science claimed cures, too, and we knew that that was just imagination. Voltaire was an intelligent man and he had laughed at miracles. Why not I?

  As I sat there searching my memory, doubts that I had hurriedly stowed away, like contraband in a bureau drawer, came back to me, reassuringly. I found that I had always been a little suspicious of the life after death. Perhaps it was really true that the dead just rotted and I would never rejoin my parents in Heaven? I scratched a spot on my uniform, watching it turn white under my thumbnail. Another memory was tapping at my consciousness: the question of the Resurrection of the Body. At the last trump, all the bodies of men, from Adam onward, were supposed to leap from their graves and rejoin the souls that had left them; this was why the Church forbade cremation. But somewhere, not so long ago, I had heard a priest quote scornfully a materialistic argument against this. The materialist said (yes, that was it!) that people rotted and turned into fertilizer, which went into vegetables, and then other people ate the vegetables, so that when the Resurrection came there would not be enough bodies to go around. The priest answered that for God, anything was possible; if God made man from clay, He could certainly make some extra bodies. But in that case, I thought, pouncing, why did He object to cremation? And in any case they would not be the same bodies, which was the whole point. And I could think of an even stronger instance: What about cannibals? If God divided the cannibal into the component bodies he had digested, what would become of the cannibal? God could start with whatever flesh the cannibal had had when he was a baby, before he began eating missionaries, but if his father and mother had been cannibals too, what flesh would he really have that he could call his own?

  At that time, I did not know that this problem had been treated by Aquinas, and with a child’s pertinacity, I mined away at the foundations of the Fortress Rock. Elation had replaced fear. I could hardly wait now to meet Father Dennis and confront him with these doubts, so remarkable in one of my years. Parallels with the young Jesus, discoursing with the scribes and doctors, bounded through my head: “And all that heard Him were astonished at His Wisdom and His answers.” No one now, I felt certain, would dare accuse me of faking. I strolled along proudly with the messenger who had come to fetch me; just as her knock sounded, I had reached the stage of doubting the divinity of Christ. I could see in the wondering looks this Iris was shedding on me that already I was a credit to the milieu.

  In the dark parlor, the priest was waiting, still in his cassock—a wrinkled, elderly man with a hairless face and brown, dead curly hair that looked like a wig. He had a weary, abstracted air as he turned away from the window, as though he had spent his life in the confessional box. His voice was hollow; everything about him was colorless and dry. As chaplain to Madame MacIllvra, he must have become a sort of spiritual factotum, like an upper servant in an apron, and there was despondency in his manner, as though his Nunc Dimittis would never be pronounced. It was clear that he did not have the resilience of our clever nuns.

  “You have doubts, Mother says,” he began in a low, listless voice, pointing me to a straight chair opposite him and then seating himself in an armchair, with half-averted face, as priests do in the confessional. I nodded self-importantly. “Yes, Father,” I recited. “I doubt the divinity of Christ and the Resurrection of the Body and the real existence of Heaven and Hell.”
The priest raised his scanty eyebrows, like two little wigs, and sighed. “You have been reading atheistic literature?” I shook my head. “No Father. The doubts came all by themselves.” The priest cupped his chin in his hand. “So,” he murmured. “Let us have them then.”

  I was hurt when he interrupted me right in the middle of the cannibals. “These are scholastic questions,” he said curtly. “Beyond the reach of your years. Believe me, the Church has an answer for them.” A feeling of disappointment came over me; it seemed to me that I had a right to know the answer to the cannibal question, since I had thought it up all by myself, but my “Why can’t I know nows” were brushed aside, just as though I had been asking about how babies were born. “No,” said Father Dennis, with finality. My first excitement was punctured and I began to be suspicious of him, in the manner of adolescents. What, I asked myself shrewdly, was the Church trying to hide from me?

  “Let us come to more important matters.” He leaned forward in his chair, with the first sign of interest he had given. “You doubt the divinity of Our Lord?” I felt a peculiar avidity in his question that made me wish to hold back. A touch of fear returned to me. “I think so,” I said dubiously, half ready to abandon my ground. “Think! Don’t you know?” he demanded, raising his voice like a frail thunderbolt. Quailing, I produced my doubt—I was one of those cowards who are afraid not to be brave. Nevertheless, I spoke hurriedly, in gulps, as if swallowing medicine. We are supposed to know that He was God because He rose from the dead—that was His sign to us that He was more than man. But you can’t prove that He rose from the dead. That’s only what the Apostles said. How do we know they were telling the truth? They were very ignorant, superstitious men—just fishermen, weren’t they? People like that nowadays believe in fairies and spirits.” I looked appealingly up at him, half begging recognition for my doubt and half waiting for him to settle it.