Memories of a Catholic Girlhood

by Mary McCarthy

  She had been a beautiful woman, “the most beautiful woman in Seattle,” my friends’ mothers used to tell me, adding that my mother, in her day, had been the most beautiful woman in Seattle, too. I can see it in the case of my mother, but my grandmother does not appear beautiful to me in the few photographs that exist of her as a young woman. Handsome, I would say, with a long, narrow, high-nosed, dark-eyed, proud, delicate face, the pure forehead topped by severe, somewhat boyish curls, such as the Romantic poets used to cultivate. A Biblical Jewish face that might have belonged to the young Rachel when Jacob first saw her. Her ears were pierced, and in one photograph she is wearing a pair of round, button-style earrings that lend her, somehow, a Russian appearance; in another, where she is posed with my mother as a little girl, her hair is caught in a big dark hair ribbon that gives her the air of a student. She has a gentle, open, serious mien—qualities I would never associate with the sharp, jaunty woman I knew or with the woman of the mature photograph on her chiffonier. Perhaps fashions in photography are responsible for the difference or perhaps her character changed radically during the early years of her marriage. The long, dreamy countenance became short, broad, and genial; the wide eyes narrowed and drew closer together. The change is so profound as to evoke the question “What happened?” The young woman in the photographs looks as though she could be easily hurt.

  She came to Seattle from San Francisco, where her father had been what she called a “broker.” Whether she meant a pawnbroker, I never could discover. He was a Forty-niner, having gone out to California in the gold rush, after a year in Pennsylvania. He had left Europe during the troubles of ’48, and I like to think he was a political émigré, but I do not know. I do not know, though I once asked her, what part of Europe he came from. Poland, I suspect; her name, however, was German: Morganstern. Her first name was Augusta. These few sketchy facts were all she seemed to know of her early life and family history, and it puzzled her that anyone should want to find out more. “All those old things, Mary,” she would say to me half grumpily. “Why do you keep asking me all those old things?” Like many great beauties, she had little curiosity; for nearly ten years, she did not know the name of the family who had moved into the house next door to us.

  Her parents had died when she was quite young—in her teens—and she and her younger sister, my Aunt Rosie, came to live in Seattle with an older sister, Eva, who had married a fur importer named Aronson; this was the lady with the polar-bear rug. The girls had had some private education; my grandmother, at one time, used to play the piano—rather prettily, I imagine. She had a pleasing speaking voice and a surprising knowledge of classical music. “Were you rich or poor?” I asked her once, trying to learn the source of these accomplishments. “My father had a nice business,” she replied. She had read the Russian novelists; when I sought to introduce her to Tolstoy and Dostoevski, she gave her dry laugh and said they had been the popular writers of her youth. All her life, she retained a taste for long novels that went on from generation to generation, on the model of War and Peace. She hated short stories, because, she said, just as you got to know the characters, the story ended; it was not worth the trouble. Her sister Rose was fourteen when the two arrived in Seattle; Aunt Rosie went out and inspected the University of Washington, which had just been started, and decided she knew more than the professors did, a fact she faced up to ruefully, since she had been yearning for a higher education.

  Aunt Rosie was a very different person from my grandmother, yet they talked together on the phone for nearly an hour every day and often went “downtown” together in the afternoon, my grandmother stopping by at her house to pick her up in the electric, later in the Chrysler or the La Salle. Aunt Rosie was a short, bright, very talkative, opinionated woman, something of a civic activist and something of a Bohemian. She had married an easygoing New York Jew, Uncle Mose Gottstein, a juicy, cigar-smoking man who ran a furniture store, subscribed to the New York Times, and liked to chat about current events, his cigar tilted at a reflective angle, upward, in his cherry-red mouth. He and Aunt Rosie often sat up all night, in their first-floor bedroom, with its big walnut double bed, Uncle Mose in his nightgown reading the newspapers, and Aunt Rosie playing a solitaire, which she would not leave till it came out. Uncle Mose had fond recollections of Luchow’s and of Jimmy Durante, whom he remembered as a singing waiter, and their big bedroom, strewn with newsprint and playing cards and smelling of cigar smoke, was like a club or a café. Aunt Rosie and her husband and two sons always sat there, even in the daytime, instead of in the living room or the little parlor, which was lined with signed photographs of opera stars and violinists and pianists. Aunt Rosie had “known them all”; in her youth, she had been a vocal soloist, much in demand for weddings and special services in Seattle’s Protestant churches. Later, she had managed the musical events at Seattle’s Metropolitan Theatre; the high point of her life had been a trip she took to Vancouver with Chaliapin, about whom Uncle Mose liked to twit her, his small, moist eyes (he later developed cataracts) beaming behind his glasses, his apple cheeks flushed. Aunt Rosie had met other artistes besides Chaliapin and the various divas, including Mary Garden and Galli-Curci, who had inscribed their photographs to her; thanks to her theater connection, she had known Houdini and the Great Alexander and could explain the magicians’ acts by the fact that there was a trapdoor on the Metropolitan Theatre’s stage. When I knew her, she was running the Ladies’ Musical Club.

  Aunt Rosie was poor, compared to her sisters. Her husband was the kind of man who is chronically unsuccessful in business—the genial uncle nearly every Jewish family possesses who has to be helped out by the others. Aunt Rosie had a plain “girl” to give her a hand with the housework; she dressed very unmodishly and lived in a somewhat run-down section in a smallish frame house that needed painting. She was active in the temple as well as in the musical world. The cookbook of the Ladies’ Auxiliary of the Temple de Hirsch, a volume got up for charity and much used in our family—I still own a copy—has many recipes contributed by Mrs. M. A. Gottstein. Her chicken stewed with noodles, hamburger in tomatoes, and rhubarb pie are quite unlike the recipes contributed by Mrs. S. A. Aronson, my other great-aunt, which begin with directions like this: “Take a nice pair of sweetbreads, add a cup of butter, a glass of good cream, sherry, and some foie gras.” Or her recipe for baked oysters: “Pour over each caviar and cream, and dot with bits of butter. Serve hot.”

  Aunt Rosie, with her energy, her good heart, and rattling, independent tongue, was a popular woman in Seattle, among all classes and kinds. Society ladies fond of music gushed over “the wonderful Mrs. Gottstein”; poor Jewish ladies in the temple praised her; Protestant clergymen respected her (they used to try, she told me, to convert her when she was younger, because she sang their anthems with such feeling); judges, politicians, butchers, poor tailors, clerks in bookstores all knew Aunt Rosie. She had not let the Protestant ministers tempt her away from her religion, but she was a truly open person, able to cross barriers naturally because she did not notice they were there. Most of the Jews in Seattle lived a life apart, concerned with bar mizvahs and weddings, and family and business affairs; a few, with German-sounding names, managed to cross into the Gentile world and get their sons pledged to regular fraternities at the university, leaving temple and observances behind them. Aunt Rosie was a unique case. Her Jewishness—that is, her bounce and volubility—was a positive asset to her in her dealings with the Gentile ascendancy. If my grandmother’s marriage (to a Gentile) had made it a little easier for Aunt Rosie to get around, Aunt Rosie, I think, never suspected it; she had a lively self-conceit and no social envy or ambition. To her good-humored mind, being Jewish was simply a matter of religion.

  Each of the three sisters had a different attitude toward their Jewish heritage, perhaps in each case conditioned by the man they had married. Aunt Eva—Mrs. Aronson, whose husband, Uncle Sig, had long ago passed on—was a typical wealthy widow of Jewish high society. She tra
veled a good deal, with a rather hard, smart set who had connections in Portland, San Francisco, New York, and even Paris; she gambled, and went to resorts and fashionable hotels in season; when she was in Seattle, she was an habituée of the Jewish country club, where they golfed in the daytime and played bridge for very high stakes at night. The scale of living of these people—widows and widowers, bachelors and divorcees, for the most part—was far beyond anything conceived of by the local Christian haute bourgeoisie, which was unaware of their existence. This unawareness was mutual, at least in the case of Aunt Eva, who, gyrating with perfect aplomb on her roulette wheel of hotels, yachts, race tracks, and spas, her white hairdress always in order, seemed ignorant of the fact that there was a non-Jewish society right under her nose, whose doings were recorded in the newspapers, daily and Sunday, whose members were “seen lunching” at the Olympic Hotel on Mondays, or golfing at the Seattle Golf Club next to the Highlands, or sunning at the Tennis Club on the lake.

  Aunt Eva, I think, hardly realized that the world contained persons who were not Jewish. She, too, never knew envy; her nature was serene and imperturbable. My grandmother’s mixed marriage never seemed to give her a qualm; her tall unawareness was sublime, a queenly attribute. If my grandfather was not “of the tribe,” as my Irish relations used to call it suggestively, she did not give any sign of perceiving it. The “unpleasant” was barred by Aunt Eva, who seldom read anything and talked in magnificent generalities. She was fond of the theater, and when she was not traveling, she used to go every week to see the Henry Duffy stock company in Seattle. My grandmother, Aunt Rosie, and I had strong opinions about these players (“He’s a perfect stick,” my grandmother almost invariably complained of the leading man), but to Aunt Eva there were no distinctions. Every play she saw she pronounced “very enjoyable.” And of the actors: “They took their parts well.” We used to laugh at her and try to get her to acknowledge that the play was better some weeks than others. But Aunt Eva would not cross that Rubicon; she smelled a rat. To her, all the plays and players were equal, and equally, blandly good.

  Toward the end of her life, she suffered cruelly from indigestion (the foie gras and the cup of butter, doubtless), and it was an awful thing to watch her, after a Sunday luncheon at our house, majestic and erect, walk about our back living room, her lips bubbling a little and her face pale-vanilla-colored and contorting slightly from spasms of pain. “Gas,” she would say, with dignity. It tortured me to see this highly aristocratic lady reduced by her stomach to what I felt must be a horrible embarrassment for her, but her unawareness seemed to extend to the “unpleasant” aspect of her sufferings; she entertained them, as it were, graciously, like a hostess. My grandfather showed her great sympathy during these ordeals of hers; she was his favorite, I think, among my grandmother’s relations. Having helped her with her business affairs, he must have come to realize that Aunt Eva, unlike her sisters, was extremely stupid. Perhaps this regal stupidity, like that of a stately white ox, elicited his chivalry, for he was a gallant man, or perhaps the slow measured pace of her wits allowed him to forget that she was one of the Chosen (another classic epithet dear to my Irish relations).

  How did my grandfather feel about the Jews? Again, I do not know; this was one of the many mysteries that surrounded our family life. He almost never attended church, except to be a pallbearer at a funeral, but he was by birth a Presbyterian Yankee, the son of a West Point man, who was head of a military college in Norwich, Vermont, commanded a Negro regiment during the Civil War, and was retired as a brigadier general. Simon Manly Preston was my great-grandfather’s name (wife: Martha Sargent, born in New Hampshire), and he lived to be ninety-nine; his last years were passed in Seattle, where he was one of the local curiosities. All his progeny, including Uncle Ed, another West Point man, who died in his fifties, were eventually drawn to Seattle; my grandfather Harold, my great-uncle Clarence, and my great-aunt Alice, who married a law partner of my grandfather’s, Eugene H. Carr, and lived for a time in Alaska. My grandfather first came west working as a geodetic surveyor during his college vacation (he started at Cornell and finished at what is now Grinnell College, Iowa), and when he had his A.B. degree, he decided to read law in Seattle. It was then that he must have first met my grandmother, aged circa seventeen, who was living in the house of the fur importer, Sigismund Aronson. Did this name ring strangely on my grandfather’s Yankee ears? Possibly not. Seattle was a frontier town, where you could expect to meet all kinds—French and Dutch and Germans, aristocrats and plebeians. Many of our first families had aristocratic pedigrees (the de Turennes, the von Phuls), yet it used to be said of every first family that the great-grandfather “came here with his pack on his back.” My grandmother was courted by a number of suitors, including one, George Preston, who had the same last name as my grandfather. She had Jewish beaux also, I discovered, and, as far as I could make out, she did not distinguish between the two kinds. They were assorted young men who took her driving; that was all.

  “As far as I could make out—” this matter was impossible to probe with my grandmother. I don’t think I ever used the word “Jewish” in any connection when talking with her. I sensed she would not like it. I used to think about the word a lot myself, when I first came back to Seattle and was sent as a five-day boarder to a Sacred Heart convent. I thought about it partly because of the ugly innuendoes dropped by my father’s people, but chiefly because I was in love with my cousin, Aunt Rosie’s tall, ravishing son Burton, who was twenty-one, ten years older than I, and I worried, being a Catholic, about the impediments to our marriage: the fact that he was my first cousin once removed, and the difference in religion—would he have to be baptized? This passion of mine was secret (or at least I hope it was), but even if it had not been, I could not have discussed the problem with my grandmother because of that unmentionable word.

  I myself had a curious attitude, I now realize, in which the crudest anti-Semitism (“Ikey-Mose-Abie,” I used to chant, under my breath, to myself in the convent) mingled with infatuation and with genuine tolerance and detachment. I liked Uncle Mose and Aunt Rosie far better than any other older people I knew, and “Ikey-Mose-Abie” represented what I supposed others would think of them. It was a sort of defiance. If I identified a little bit of myself with those others, my dead mother had gone much further; one day, I found a letter she had written to my grandmother McCarthy in which she spoke of an evening “with the Hebrews.” Finding this letter was one of the great shocks of my adolescence. It destroyed my haloed image of my mother, and the thought that her mother must have read it, too (for there it was, in my desk, put away for me with other family keepsakes), nearly made me ill.

  Perhaps I was too sensitive on my grandmother’s behalf. No secret was ever made of the family connection with Aunt Rosie and Aunt Eva, and whenever my grandmother gave a tea, it always appeared in the paper that Mrs. M. A. Gottstein and Mrs. S. A. Aronson poured. I used to hear about some distant cousin having a bar mizvah, and once I was taken to a Jewish wedding, which fascinated me because it was held at night in a hotel ballroom. Nevertheless, there was something—a shying away from the subject, an aversion to naming it in words—so much so that I was startled, one morning, when I was about sixteen, to hear my grandmother allude to “my faith.” I had been talking to her about my disbelief in God, and to my surprise she grew quite agitated. She no longer practiced her faith, she declared, but she was certain that there was a kind God Who understood and Who watched over everything. She spoke with great feeling and emphasis—a rare thing in our relations.

  It was characteristic of her queer, oblique nature that I chanced to find out that she had had Jewish suitors by idly asking her the names of the young men she had driven out with. She gave them with perfect readiness, but without any indication that such a name as Schwabacher or Rosenblatt would tell a story to me. If it had been a major step to marry outside her own people, she did not seem to recall this any more, and, of course, I could not ask her.


  Yet in other respects she was remarkably frank. “How did you come to marry Grandpa?” I asked her one night, when I was home on a visit after I myself had married. “Rosie and I didn’t get along with Uncle Sig,” she answered matter-of-factly.

  So that was all; I could hardly believe my ears, and wondered whether she realized the enormity of what she was saying. “But why did you pick Grandpa instead of one of the others?” I pressed her, determined, for Grandpa’s sake, that she would answer that it had been because of his eyes or his mustache or his intellect. She appeared to search her memory, in vain, “Oh, I don’t know, Mary,” she said, yawning. “You must know,” I retorted. She thought he would be good to her, she finally conceded.