Memories of a Catholic Girlhood

by Mary McCarthy

  The priest passed a hand across his forehead. “You consider Our Lord a liar, then?” he said in a sepulchral tone. “You think He deceived the poor, ignorant Apostles by pretending to be the Son of God. That is what you are saying, my child, though you do not know it yourself. You are calling Our Blessed Saviour a liar and a cheat.” “He might have been mistaken,” I objected, feeling rather cross. “He might have thought He was God.” Father Dennis closed his eyes. “You must have faith, my child,” he said abruptly, rising from his chair and taking a few quick steps, his cassock bobbing.

  I gazed at him in humble perplexity. For the first time, he seemed to me rather holy, as if the word “faith” had elicited something sweet and sanctified from his soul, but by the same token he seemed very remote from me, as if he were feeling something that I was unable to feel. Yet he was not answering my arguments; in fact, he was looking down at me with a grave, troubled expression, as if he, too, were suddenly conscious of a gulf between us, a gulf that could not be bridged by words. The awesome thought struck me that perhaps I had lost my faith. Could it have slipped away without my knowing it? “Help me, Father,” I implored meekly, aware that this was the right thing to say but meaning it nevertheless.

  I seemed to have divided into two people, one slyly watching as the priest sank back into the armchair, the other anxious and aghast at the turn the interview was taking. “The wisdom and goodness of Jesus,” Father Dennis said slowly, “as we find it in His life and teachings—do you think mere man was capable of this?” I pondered. “Why not?” I queried, soberly. But the priest glanced at me with reproach, as if I were being fresh. “You don’t know your history, I see. Among the prophets and the pagans, among the kings and philosophers, among the saints and scholars, was there ever such a One?” A little smile glinted in the corners of his mouth. “No,” I admitted. The priest nodded. “There, you see, my child. Such a departure from our ordinary human nature signifies the Divine intervention. If we had only Christ’s teaching, we could know that He was God. But in addition we have His miracles, the firm assurance of tradition, and the Living Church, the Rock on which He built and which survived the buffets of the ages, where the false religions foundered and were lost to the mind of man.”

  He took out his watch and peered at it in the dusk. My pride, again, was offended. “It’s not only good things that survive,” I said boldly. “There’s sin, for instance.” “The devil is eternal,” said Father Dennis, sighing, with a quick glance at me.

  “But then the Church could be the instrument of the devil, couldn’t it?” Father Dennis swooped. “Then the teachings of Jesus, which it guards, are of diabolical origin?” I flushed. “Other religions have lasted,” I said, retreating. “The Jewish religion and Mohammedanism. Is that because they are diabolic?” I spoke with an air of ingenuousness, but I knew I had him in a corner; there were Jewish girls in the convent. “They have a partial truth,” Father Dennis murmured. “Hence they have been preserved.” I became impatient with this sparring, which was taking me away from a real point I had glimpsed. “Yes, Father,” I said. “But still I don’t see that the fact that Christ was an exception proves that He was God.” “There are no exceptions in nature,” retorted Father Dennis. “Oh, Father!” I cried. “I can think of lots.”

  I was burning to pursue this subject, for it had come to me, slowly, that Christ really could have been a man. The idea of Christ as simply man had something extraordinary and joyous about it that was different, I perceived, from the condescension of God to the flesh. I was glad I had started this discussion, for I was learning something new every second. All fear had left me and all sense of mere willful antagonism. I was intent on showing Father Dennis the new possibilities that opened; my feeling for him was comradely.

  But once more he shut me off. “You must accept what I tell you,” he said, almost sharply. “You are too young to understand these things. You must have faith.” “But you’re supposed to give me faith, Father,” I protested. “Only God can do that,” he answered. “Pray, and He will grant it.” “I can’t pray,” I said automatically. “You know your prayers,” he said. “Say them.” He rose, and I made my curtsy. “Father!” I cried out suddenly, in desperation at the way he was leaving me. “There’s something else!”

  He turned back, fatiguedly, but the wild look on my face must have alarmed him. “What is it, my child?” He came a little nearer, peering at me with a concerned, kindly expression. “My child,” he said gravely, “do you doubt the existence of God?” “Yes,” I breathed, in exultant agony, knowing that it was true.

  He sat down with me again and took my hand. Very gently, seeing that this was what I seemed to want of him, he recited for me the five a posteriori proofs of God’s existence: the argument of the unmoved Mover, the argument of efficient causes, the argument of the Necessary Being implied by contingent beings, the argument of graduated perfections, the argument of the wonderful order and design in the universe. Most of what he said I did not understand, but the gist was clear to me. It was that every effect must have a cause and the cause was, of course, God. The universe could not exist unless some self-sufficient Being had created it and put it in motion. I listened earnestly, trying to test what he said, almost convinced and yet not quite. It was as though the spirit of doubt had wormed its way into the very tissue of my thinking, so that axioms that had seemed simple and clear only an hour or so before now became perplexing and murky. “Why, Father,” I asked finally, “does everything have to have a cause? Why couldn’t the universe just be there, causing itself?”

  Father Dennis lit the lamp on the table beside him; the bell rang for goûter, a girl poked her head in and hurriedly withdrew. “Because,” he said patiently, “I have just explained to you, every effect must have a proportionate cause.” I turned this over in my head, reminding myself that I was a child and that he probably thought I did not comprehend him. “Except God,” I repeated helpfully. The priest nodded. “But Father,” I cried, with a sudden start of discovery, “why can’t the universe be self-sufficient if God can? Why can’t something in matter be the uncaused cause? Like electricity?”

  The priest shook his head sorrowfully. “I cannot tell you, my child.” He dropped into a different tone, caustic and reproachful. “I cannot open eyes that blindly refuse to see. Can inert matter give birth to spirit? Did inert matter give you your conscience? Who deny causal necessity make the world a chaos where vice and anarchy reign!” His hollow voice reverberated as if he were addressing a whole dockful of secular philosophers, arraigned in a corner of the room. “Oh, my child,” he concluded, rising, “give up reading that atheistic filth. Pray to God for faith and make a good confession.” He left the room swiftly, his cassock swelling behind him.

  Father Dennis’s failure made a great impression on the convent. Wherever I went, eyes regarded me respectfully: there went the girl that a Jesuit had failed to convince. The day girls and five day boarders, returning on Monday, quickly heard the news. Little queens who had never noticed my existence gathered round me at recess and put me whispered questions, for we were not supposed to talk during the retreat. The coincidence of the holy fervor of the retreat with my unsanctified state heightened the sense of the prodigious. It was thought that Father Heeney, the curly-haired, bronzed missionary who had got such results among the Eskimos, was pitting his oratory against me. In her office, at a second interview, Madame MacIllvra wiped the corners of her eyes with her plain cambric handkerchief. She felt that she had betrayed a trust reposed in her, from Heaven, by my dead mother. Tears came readily to her, as to most pretty lady principals, especially when she felt that the convent might be open to criticism. By Wednesday, the third time she saw me, we had come to a serious pass. My deskmate, Louise, had bet me that I would not get my faith back by Wednesday; as one fiery sermon followed another and I remained unswayed, a sort of uneasiness settled down over the convent. It was clear to everyone, including me, that I would have to get my faith back to put a
n end to this terrible uncertainty.

  I was as much concerned now as Madame MacIllvra herself. I was trying, with all my power, to feel faith, if only as a public duty, but the more I tapped and tested myself, the more I was forced to recognize that there was no belief inside me. My very soul had fled, as far as I could make out. Curiously enough, for the first time, seeing what I had wrought, I had a sense of obligation to others and not to my own soul or to God, which was a proof in itself that I had lost God, for our chief obligation in life was supposed to be to please Him. God (if there was a God) would certainly not be pleased if I pretended to regain my faith to satisfy Madame MacIllvra and Madame Barclay and my new friend and double, Louise, who was mischievous but a good Catholic. Yet this was the decision I came to after a second unfruitful session in the parlor, this time with Father Heeney, who could convert me, I felt leadenly, if anybody could. He had said all the same things that Father Dennis had said, though calling me by my first name and laughing when I told him that my father and grandfather were lawyers, as though my serious doubts were part of what he called the gift of gab. He, too, seemed convinced that I had been reading atheistic literature and warned me, jestingly, of the confessional when I denied it. These priests, I thought bitterly, seemed to imagine that you could do nothing for yourself, that everything was from inheritance and reading, just as they imagined that Christ could not have been a “mere man,” and just, for that matter, as they kept saying that you must have “faith,” a word that had become more and more irritating to me during the past few days. “Natural reason, Mary,” expatiated Father Heeney, “will not take you the whole way today. There’s a little gap that we have to fill with faith.” I looked up at him measuringly. So there was a gap, then. How was it that they had never mentioned this interesting fact to us before?

  As I left the parlor, I decided to hold Father Heeney personally responsible for the deception he was forcing me into. “I’ll see you in the confessional,” he called after me in his full, warm voice, but it was not me, I promised myself, that he was going to see but a mere pious effigy of myself. By failing to convert me and treating my case so lightly—calling me Thomasina, for instance, in a would-be funny reference to doubting Thomas—he was driving me straight into fraud. Thanks to his incompetence, the only thing left for me to do was to enact a simulated conversion. But I had no intention of giving him the credit. I was going to pretend to be converted in the night, by a dream.

  And I did not feel a bit sorry, even on Thursday morning, kneeling in my white veil at the altar railing to receive the Host. Behind me, the nuns, I knew, were rejoicing, as good nuns should, over the reclamation of a soul. Madame MacIllvra’s blue eyes were probably misting. Beside me, Pork Barrel was bursting her seams with envy. Louise (I had just informed her in the veiling room) had invited me to spend the night with her during Christmas vacation. My own chief sensation was one of detached surprise at how far I had come from my old mainstays, as once, when learning to swim, I had been doing the dead-man’s float and looked back, raising my doused head, to see my water wings drifting, far behind me, on the lake’s surface.

  This story is so true to our convent life that I find it almost impossible to sort out the guessed-at and the half-remembered from the undeniably real. The music master, the old snoring nun, the English actor reciting “Lepanto,” the embroidery, A Tale of Two Cities, Emma, Lady Spindle (the other character in this playlet was Mrs. Dwindle), all this is just as it was. I am not absolutely certain of the chronology; the whole drama of my loss of faith took place during a very short space of time, and I believe it was during a retreat. The conversations, as I have warned the reader, are mostly fictional, but their tone and tenor are right. That was the way the priests talked, and those, in general, were the arguments they brought to bear on me. Even though I wrote this myself, I smile in startled recognition as I read it.

  The proofs of God’s existence are drawn from the Catholic Encyclopedia. My own questions are a mixture of memory and conjecture. One bit of dialogue was borrowed from an Episcopal clergyman: “There’s a little gap that we have to fill with faith.” My son, “Reuel, came home one day and quoted this from his Sacred Study teacher. I laughed (it was so like the way my priests had talked) and put it in.

  Actually, it now seems to me that my interview with the first priest took place not in the convent parlor but in the old priest’s study. Where this study was and how I got there, I have no idea. As for the second priest, whom I call Father Heeney, this may have been the missionary father from “The Blackguard” or it may have been someone else whom I have mixed up with him. All I really remember was that his attitude toward my supposed doubts was much more brusque and summary than the old priest’s. He did not take them seriously, which annoyed me, partly for reasons of vanity, but mainly because, by this time, they had become serious and I was frightened. This priest, if it was the same one, had small patience with girls.

  The McCarthy family always held my grandfather responsible for the “atheistic ideas” I had imbibed in Seattle, yet of my three brothers, all of whom were secured from his influence, only one, the youngest, remains in the Church. In my mother’s generation, the Church made three recruits. All the Protestant daughters-in-law became converts, Uncle Florrie, Aunt Esther’s husband, held out to the end—he would drive his family to Sunday Mass and stay outside, himself, in the car, exciting wonder and envy in the children. In my generation, at least three (I am not sure about my cousins) were lost to the Faith.

  Contrary to what the McCarthys believed, my grandfather Preston made it his duty to see that I kept up my religion. It was a pact between us that I would continue to go to church on Sundays until I was a little older. But he never questioned my sincerity. When I told him I had lost my faith (and by then it was true), he did not treat it as a dodge for getting out of Mass. Most families, I think, would have done this. That a person, even a child, was acting from conscientious motives seemed to him natural and fitting. His fair-mindedness rested on this assumption. Many years later, when I became a radical in my early twenties, he received this news with the same searching gravity; the car that had once taken me to church, or, rather, its replacement, now took me to meetings at the Labor Temple, by my grandfather’s orders.

  I shall describe the Preston family life in subsequent chapters. At this period, while I was still in the convent, I was something of an alien at home. My school friends were all Catholics, and their parents, for the most part, were unknown to my grandparents, who were separated from them not only by religion but by the difference of a generation. None of these children ever came to my house, though I was taken to theirs. My chief interest was the stage; the wish to play a part and attract notice, together with a quick memory, had persuaded me that I was born for the footlights. At home, I was always giving recitations and inviting the Preston family to listen to them. My favorite pieces were “Lord Ullin’s “Daughter” and “The Inchcape “Rock.” My new uncles and my aunt and grandmother found these recitations hilarious, but for a long time I did not suspect this. Then I would not recite for them any more.

  To the family, I was a curio, and so I was looked on by some of the girls in the convent, as the reader will see in the next chapter. As a child, I had had no self-consciousness; my seriousness prevented me from seeing that other people might be laughing at me. Now I had to learn this.

  Names

  ANNA LYONS, MARY LOUISE Lyons, Mary von Phul, Emilie von Phul, Eugenia McLellan, Marjorie McPhail, Marie-Louise L’Abbé, Mary Danz, Julia Dodge, Mary Fordyce Blake, Janet Preston—these were the names (I can still tell them over like a rosary) of some of the older girls in the convent: the Virtues and Graces. The virtuous ones wore wide blue or green moire good-conduct ribbons, bandoleer-style, across their blue serge uniforms; the beautiful ones wore rouge and powder or at least were reputed to do so. Our class, the eighth grade, wore pink ribbons (I never got one myself) and had names like Patricia (“Pat”) Sullivan, Eileen Donohoe, and Joan
Kane. We were inelegant even in this respect; the best name we could show, among us, was Phyllis (“Phil”) Chatham, who boasted that her father’s name, Ralph, was pronounced “Rafe” as in England.

  Names had a great importance for us in the convent, and foreign names, French, German, or plain English (which, to us, were foreign, because of their Protestant sound), bloomed like prize roses among a collection of spuds. Irish names were too common in the school to have any prestige either as surnames (Gallagher, Sheehan, Finn, Sullivan, McCarthy) or as Christian names (Kathleen, Eileen). Anything exotic had value: an “olive” complexion, for example. The pet girl of the convent was a fragile Jewish girl named Susie Lowenstein, who had pale red-gold hair and an exquisite retroussé nose, which, if we had had it, might have been called “pug.” We liked her name too and the name of a child in the primary grades: Abbie Stuart Baillargeon. My favorite name, on the whole, though, was Emilie von Phul (pronounced “Pool”); her oldest sister, recently graduated, was called Celeste. Another name that appealed to me was Genevieve Albers, Saint Genevieve being the patron saint of Paris who turned back Attila from the gates of the city.

  All these names reflected the still-pioneer character of the Pacific Northwest. I had never heard their like in the parochial school in Minneapolis, where “foreign” extraction, in any case, was something to be ashamed of, the whole drive being toward Americanization of first name and surname alike. The exceptions to this were the Irish, who could vaunt such names as Catherine O’Dea and the name of my second cousin, Mary Catherine Anne Rose Violet McCarthy, while an unfortunate German boy named Manfred was made-to suffer for his. But that was Minneapolis. In Seattle, and especially in the convent of the Ladies of the Sacred Heart, foreign names suggested not immigration but emigration—distinguished exile. Minneapolis was a granary; Seattle was a port, which had attracted a veritable Foreign Legion of adventurers—soldiers of fortune, younger sons, gamblers, traders, drawn by the fortunes to be made in virgin timber and shipping and by the Alaska Gold Rush. Wars and revolutions had sent the defeated out to Puget Sound, to start a new life; the latest had been the Russian Revolution, which had shipped us, via Harbin, a Russian colony, complete with restaurant, on Queen Anne Hill. The English names in the convent, when they did not testify to direct English origin, as in the case of “Rafe” Chatham, had come to us from the South and represented a kind of internal exile; such girls as Mary Fordyce Blake and Mary McQueen Street (a class ahead of me; her sister was named Francesca) bore their double-barreled first names like titles of aristocracy from the ante-bellum South. Not all our girls, by any means, were Catholic; some of the very prettiest ones—Julia Dodge and Janet Preston, if I remember rightly—were Protestants. The nuns had taught us to behave with special courtesy to these strangers in our midst, and the whole effect was of some superior hostel for refugees of all the lost causes of the past hundred years. Money could not count for much in such an atmosphere; the fathers and grandfathers of many of our “best” girls were ruined men.