Memories of a Catholic Girlhood

by Mary McCarthy

  Another of the track man’s admirers was a shy, intellectual Jewish girl named Ethel Rosenberg (she later changed her first name to Teya) who was also an enthusiast for Walter Pater. She and I became friends; we lived not far from each other. Through her family, who were typical Jewish intellectuals and very hospitable, though not well-to-do (the father was a tailor), I came to know the artistic colony in Seattle and to read serious books. But all this took place on a different plane from my other activities. The only point of fusion had been the track man.

  After a year of public high school, my grandparents concluded that there was nothing to do but put me into boarding school, away from the distractions offered by the opposite sex. A convent, this time, was not considered; I was old enough, now, my grandfather said, to choose for myself in religious matters. An Episcopal boarding school in Tacoma, the Annie Wright Seminary, was selected, though I myself had wanted to go to the Anna Head School in California, because Helen Wills had gone there. But the family thought it wiser to keep me nearer home.

  Meanwhile, my brothers remained in Saint Benedict’s Academy, my youngest brother, Sheridan, had joined the other two. They were kept there, with the nuns, during Christmas and Easter vacations, in the summer, they were parceled out among relations or sent to camp. It was six years before we saw each other again, and then they were almost strangers to me, so different had been our bringing-up. I was a child of wealth, and they were little pensioners on the trust fund that was left by my grandfather McCarthy when he died. My share, which was equal to each of theirs, never did more than pay my school board and tuition; the Prestons took care of the rest. All my brothers’ expenses, however, were itemized and deducted from the account. The Preston family “remembered” them with checks at Christmas and birthdays, but that was all. Except on these occasions, their existence seems to have been overlooked.

  When I review my grandfather’s character, I find this very puzzling. He was not the man to neglect an obligation; his bills were paid the day he received them—a habit still recalled by my New York dentist with awe. Order, exactitude, fairness—these were the traits my grandfather was famous for and the traits I always found in him. Wow, especially knowing what he did of the treatment we had received in Minneapolis, did he fail to concern himself with what happened later to my brothers? I cannot explain this.

  He was not an ungenerous or an unfeeling man. He had been strongly attached to my mother. “The Preston family wanted all of you,” my mother’s old friend writes me, as if in extenuation. Failing to get all four of us, my grandfather may have responded with a kind of masculine pique, holding himself stiffly aloof from what had been refused him, i.e., my brothers. Or he may have been angered by the slurs cast on him by the McCarthys: my uncle Harry, a few years before, had written a bank in Seattle to inquire into his financial position. Whatever the reason for this surprising indifference, I cannot deny the fact of it. Nor can I deny that I felt it, too. Until I was grown up, the idea never crossed my mind that something might have been done by the Prestons for my brothers as well as for me. The only persons, evidently, to whom this idea occurred were the McCarthys.

  The Figures in the Clock

  NOT LONG AGO, HUNTING the rule for the formation of the vocative with my thirteen-year-old son, I pulled down from a top shelf my old Allen and Greenough Latin grammar. The worn green book fell open at the flyleaf, and I saw my name, school, and class written in ink, in the ornate handwriting I had been forming during my idle hours in Annie Wright Seminary in Tacoma. Three years before, I had been sent there despairingly by my grandparents, after a year in public high school. The Sacred Heart nuns, they thought, had made me an atheist; the public high school had made me boy crazy—what next? Peering over my shoulder, my young bantam crowed to find that his haughty mother had dotted her is with circles; there they were, spattered over the page like bird droppings. Otherwise, the hand was my own, with its Greek e’s, flamboyant scroll capitals, and narrow, precisian small letters; it dashed us both to perceive that already, in my senior year in boarding school, my present character had been set. Upside down on the same page, written in pencil in a far more careless style, was a list of some kind. I inverted the book and stared. Next to three crudely drawn cylinders (the influence of physics?) and enclosed in a rough bracket was the following:

  Indianhead—Flame

  Dishrags

  Oilcloth

  Gold Paint

  Unbleached Muslin, 10 yds

  Blue Indianhead 2 ½ yds

  Ye gods, it was my Catiline costume for the Latin Club play, “Marcus Tullius”!

  Or, rather, it was the matrix from which gorgeous Catiline would emerge: those dishrags, dipped in gold paint and sewed together by our Latin teacher, Miss Gowrie, would be my chain-armor breastplate; the oilcloth, gold, stiffened with cardboard and crowned with a red plume, my helmet; the flame Indianhead my military cloak, as I appeared in the fearsome scene of the Battle of Pistoria, where I rushed into the ranks of the enemy and met my death with great bravery. The blue Indianhead I could not account for (perhaps a short military tunic?), but the unbleached muslin would seem, by its length, to have been my toga, which I flung around myself in the Senate scene as I turned on my prosing detractor and strode exultant from the stage, promising to “extinguish the flames of my own ruin in the conflagration of all Rome.”

  And yet, stay, I said to myself, frowning. Why unbleached? The senatorial toga was white, surely? And in my own recollection of that evening, the togas of my fellow senators were white, with a “purple” stripe or band, this “purple” being in actual fact scarlet, just like the Roman purpura, which came, said Miss Gowrie, from the Greek porphyra. But unbleached the togas must have been, for unbleached muslin is cheap, and Miss Harriet Gowrie, a Highland Scotswoman, was a great relier on the power of illusion. To an audience, natural muslin on a brightly lit stage is supposed to look white, just as it now looked to me across the footlit proscenium of time. I smiled ruefully to think of Miss Gowrie, with her tall, lean, doll-jointed “rigger” and rustic, homely, frugal arts, so out of place amid our marcels and water waves, riding waistcoats and crops and bowlers, fur coats and Toujours Moi and Christmas Night perfumes. Her original drama “Marcus Tullius” is preserved in my memory as a fabulous example of the homemade.

  The Latin Club presents a drama in five acts, written and produced by Harriet Gowrie, B.A., M.A.

  Act I, the Senate at Rome, 63 B.C.

  Characters in the order of speaking: Cicero ... Frances Berry.

  The thronged scene still frames itself for me like a painting by David. The curtain is ready to go up. Black-haired Miss Gowrie, in a freshly steamed black velvet dress with a wide white bertha and a corsage of roses sent by the cast, is standing in the wings, her black eyes snapping, her apple cheeks afire. Cicero, an honors student in a boyish bob, is at the rostrum, tightening her toga over her large, firm bosom; foppish Caesar and sallow Cato and other patres are sitting on wooden benches, while I, in a tier apart, lounge with a scornful smile on my dark, ruined features. In the audience, programs in hand, sit the lady principal, the dean of the Episcopal church, the bishop and the bishop’s wife; the publisher of the newspaper, the big and small fry of Puget Sound doctors, dentists, lawyers, insurance men, steamship-line owners, and lumber operators—our relations; the girls in their crepe de Chine dress uniforms; and a few of the town Lovelaces who have braved the principal’s eye. With Miss Gowrie tugging, the curtain goes up, on time. Cicero scans her teacher, waits for the applause to die, receives a vigorous nod, opens her mouth, points her finger at me, swells the bellows of her lungs, and launches on the first Catiline oration: “How far, at length, O Catiline, will you abuse our patience? To what ends does your audacious boldness boastfully display itself?”

  How far, at length, Miss Gowrie, could you abuse their patience? Cicero’s oration lasted thirty-one minutes by Miss Gowrie’s watch. The white column of Frances’s throat from time to time trembled faintly from
strain, but her steady, clear first soprano had been trained by years in the choir. As the bobbin of words in her was unreeled, she grew paler, like a patient undergoing a long extraction, while the audience sat hushed and respectful, as if in the presence of death or of one of those harrowing athletic feats, tests of endurance, that were popular during the era. There was no coughing or rustling; the only movement was on the stage benches, where the other senators, in character, drew farther away from Catiline, shaking their heads and registering dismay, disbelief, horror, or what-did-I-tell-you, according to the part they were supposed to have played in history. Cato nodded grimly to Catulus and Caesar scratched his pate. As the arraignment of Catiline proceeded, I could feel the curiosity of the first rows slowly transfer itself to me—Lucius Sergius Catilina, adulterer, extortioner, profligate, bankrupt, assassin, suspected wife-killer, broken-down patrician, democrat, demagogue, thug. The wearisome indictment made this person smile. He glanced shruggingly at his fingernails and carelessly loosened his toga, to reveal a glimpse of his tunic, with the broad scarlet clavus of the patriciate running down the middle. As a libertine and man of deeds, he found the womanish rhetoric of republican institutions oppressive; at prescribed intervals, his heavy brows jerked up and his ringed fist tightened in a gesture of menace. At long last, it was over. Cicero rounded off her peroration and stepped from the rostrum. There was a great burst of applause. Miss Gowrie signaled. My moment had come.

  From my lonely bench, I surveyed them in superb isolation, the damned soul, proud and unassimilable, the marked, gifted man. I paused, as though hesitating to waste my words on these gentry, and then leapt to my feet and delivered Catiline’s speech, in toto, as recorded by Sallust—a short tirade, unfortunately, highly colored but stiff, ending in the défì “I will extinguish the flames of my own ruin in the conflagration of all Rome.” Now this speech, from the start, had bothered me. With its threats and bombast, its Senecan frigidity, it sounded guilty and rather stupid. Even making allowances for Sallust’s prejudice and Miss Gowrie’s buckram translation, the effect of repeating it night after night in rehearsal had awakened a tiny doubt: Was the Catiline I admired so much merely a vulgar arsonist, as Cicero and his devotees contended? These first stirrings of maturity were very unwelcome. To my mind, Catiline was not only a hero—he was me. Not that I was a misfit in our school; quite the contrary. It was senior year and I was a big shot: the very oddities that had made me an object of wonder in my first years had, with time’s passing, won me fame and envy. And yet this victory did not satisfy me, for it had come about too naturally, in accordance with orderly processes—one senior class and its leaders graduated and the next came up in succession, like a roller towel being pulled. So it happens in real life, but there is something irritating in this slow unfurling of the generations, each with its roster of poets and politicians gradually moving into the ascendancy, by sheer virtue of staying power; the question of value is begged.

  And for me at sixteen, sure now of my authority in the school, sure that I would be forgiven and admired no matter what I did, whether I ran away from school, or smoked, or met boys on the afternoon walks, or was cruel and saucy to a young teacher—sure of this empty freedom, I could not be content till I had imposed not only myself but my whole pantheon on the Seminary. The vindication of Catiline appeared to me a task of consummate importance; on the momentous evening, the verdict of history was to be reversed. And unsuspected, I pridefully thought, by Miss Gowrie, I had been working up an “interesting” reading of my brimstone speech. I was going to play Catiline straight, which meant that I would have to “throw away” the greater part of my lines, to speak them coldly and limply, like a man too disillusioned to descend to oratorical effects. And then with my very last words, I was going to step forward, dismissing Cicero and the Senate, and levelly hurl my défi at the optimates of the audience—at the spectacled dean and the bishop, at the old pussy-footed teachers, at the principal and my grandparents and the mild, obedient girls. This plan I had only adumbrated in rehearsals, for I feared Miss Gowrie’s correction, and I could almost feel her tighten in the prompter’s seat as I spoke my lines into a hush, swept my toga over my shoulder, and strode off the stage, out of Rome to Etruria, to my destiny, to death. But thunderous applause broke out before the curtain could tumble down on my exit. The seventh and eighth grades, always susceptible, were stamping. “Bravo!” cried several male voices.

  Other scenes followed while I was hurried into my costume change: a scene among the secondary conspirators; a domestic scene between Cicero and his pretty freshman daughter Tullia, at home in the evening; a scene between Cicero and Fulvia, mistress of the conspirator Curius and Cicero’s spy; another scene in the Senate (the third Catiline oration?); and a scene in which some whiskered Gauls, the Allobroges, visit Cicero at his house. Following still another oration by Cicero and Caesar’s plea for clemency, sharply answered by Cato, came a barbaric scene in a dungeon, where the remaining conspirators (some supers, plus rude Lentulus and bloody Cethegus) were throttled at Cicero’s instance. Then came the big scene of the Battle of Pistoria, where I entered at the head of my army of malcontents, fought fiercely, and gave up the ghost. The curtain went down as the Republic was saved.

  In the audience, there was a veritable tumult. The school was taking sides in a clash of partisan feeling that recalled the Capulets and the Montagues or the Blues and Greens of Byzantium. Underneath its Episcopalian surface, our school was terribly factious and turbulent; the annual electioneering scandals during the voting for May Queen would have made Milo and Clodius blanch. Now curtain call followed curtain call; thanks to the eighth grade, Catiline’s applause swelled above Cicero’s as he waved his plumed helmet to his supporters. Girls were crying, and elderly doctors and lawyers pressed up to the stage to congratulate the two principals and Miss Gowrie, declaring with moist eyes that it had done them good to see it. It was pronounced the best play the Seminary had ever put on. The fervid quality of the response, indeed, took the cast by surprise. Our painted eyes interrogated each other over the heads of the swarming citizenry. The whole milling scene in the gymnasium had for us on the stage an unfamiliar, almost pioneer character, as though it had been taking place in Alaska or Virginia City in some old opera house thirty or forty years before. What we failed to take account of was the spell of the educational on the middle-aged Western heart. To these men in business suits, Miss Gowrie’s fossilized play had the wondrous note of the authentic, like a petrified forest or the footprint of the giant sloth, and Miss Gowrie herself, stiffly bobbing to their congratulations, with a tight rubber band of a smile framing her false teeth, was something of a marvel in her own right: a genuine British Empire product, like the plaid woolen scarves you bore home from a steamer excursion to Victoria.

  Our school specialized in such imports and relics. We had a fat old Austrian known as “Madam,” and Frenchwomen, of course, and Swiss, and widows of the Episcopal clergy, a tall actress, and two Virginia gentlewomen, and a beautiful blond goddess of an Englishwoman with a nose like the reversed prow of a viking ship, but none was so redoubtably foreign to us as the author of “Marcus Tullius,” who, once the curtain had been rung down that night, stood, with her arms folded and a dry, remote look in her eyes, rebuffing all pleasantries and nodding tersely as she watched the scenery struck and the costumes piled in order. In Miss Gowrie’s round head was a Big Ben that warned her when any moment was over. Cicero and I, coming up for praise, received an absent nod of commendation and an admonition to hurry on to bed that dismantled our historical personalities like so much canvas scenery. My “brilliant” reading, I saw, was going to pass without comment. The short triumph of Catiline, if she was even aware of it, had already been assimilated into the long triumph of the classics, the marshaling of ablatives, and the rule of law. It was a mistake—an American mistake—to think that success could thaw Miss Gowrie. Only work could do that, as I should have had reason to know. And yet, toward the end of rehearsals,
I could have sworn there was something, some faintly sour warmth emanating toward us all, like the warmth of her breath as she bent over you and penciled your face carefully with the make-up stick.

  I claimed Miss Gowrie as my discovery. Among the normal Seminary girls, it was thought affected to take Latin unless you “had to” for Eastern college boards or because your parents insisted. You were supposed to groan as you entered her chilly classroom, where the windows were kept open to obviate sleepiness. Miss Gowrie herself wore a maroon cardigan buttoned down over her thin chest winter and fall and spring, and those who sat near the window huddled in their coats during the greater part of the year. If we did our sight poorly, the windows were poked open farther; the long pole with the hook on the end of it came to seem a part of her personality, like Saint Joseph’s crook. And her chilblained nature had a queer, raw, stiffened sensitiveness. Like many spinsters in foreign countries, she suffered dreadfully from ideas of reference: any remark delivered in an undertone she took to concern herself and flushed up darkly, like a mulberry. She was touchy about a misdone translation, and the capillaries of her blood system seemed to tell her when you were not primed to recite, even though your hand was waving boldly. And when you knew your lesson, she peremptorily cut you short.

  At this time, she must have been about thirty-eight or forty years old. A graduate of Girton and Edinburgh, she had come, probably by way of Canada, to our little church boarding school in the Pacific Northwest. Doubtless she had taught elsewhere, in the outposts of empire; it was her first stay in the States, and she took being Scottish personally, just as she took our mistakes in translation. So far as we could determine, she had no private life or history and consisted totally of national attributes (thrift, humorless hard work, porridge-eating, and tea-drinking), like one of those wooden dolls dressed in national costume that they show at fairs and expositions. And her appearance was like an illustration to an anthropologist’s textbook. She was extremely dark, with brown skin, brown-black eyes, shiny, straight black hair, and a round skull, on which the hair grew in circular fashion. Her face was round also, with cheekbones like an Eskimo’s or a pygmy’s. She had a tall frame, stiffly articulated and curiously jerky in its movements. In short, as I now know, she belonged to that ancient Celto-Iberian or possibly Pictish strain that survives in the northern Highlands, and the foreignness we noticed in her may have been proof of the scholar’s contention that the British Isles in prehistory were inhabited by non-Aryan aborigines, whose descendants, known to the Roman writers, were the little dark men who worked in tin. Her face, hands, and neck had an almost unnatural cleanness, and her red lips drew back from a set of very white false teeth. This glistening sign of early poverty awed us, as a sign of consecration, like a monk’s tonsure.