Memories of a Catholic Girlhood

by Mary McCarthy

  Yet, true as all that may be, the other truth is that my grand­parents’ prohibitions were far from being the cause of what happened to me on the passenger seat of that Marmon. Had they let Forrest Crosby come to the house, he would have seduced me with greater ease, probably on their own living-room sofa after they had retired.

  Hold on! All the time I have been writing this, a memory has been coming back to haunt me: he did come to my house. In the summer-time, after Lake Crescent, and for some reason—perhaps sheer surprise at the daring of it—my grandmother let me receive him. On the living-room sofa, after she had gone up to bed. And he did start to seduce me right then and there, with the lights on. He was on top of me when something happened. Someone interrupted us. Perhaps it was my grandfather, returning from his club, who surprised us and told Forrest to get out of the house. Or Harold came in, and Forrest hastily left of his own accord. Anyway, we were on the sofa (the only time I ever was, with a man), and he fled, and after that he wrote to me at Annie Wright. I did not see him again till that wintry day, probably in Thanksgiving vacation.

  On that first afternoon (I think) we drove around, we talked, we parked and kissed each other and maybe went a little bit further—I am not sure. I was wildly excited but not sexually excited. At the time, though, I was unaware of there being a difference between mental arousal and specific arousal of the genital organs. This led to many misunderstandings. In my observation, girls tend to mature as sexual performers considerably after puberty, contrary to common belief, and this is confusing for young men and for the girls themselves, especially when mental development, with its own excitement, has far outdistanced the other. I do not know the explanation but am sometimes tempted to agree with the theory that the orgasm in human females is learned from the male.

  In any case, the excitement, almost ecstasy, I felt in that first embrace is hard to remember back to, since sex, by now familiar, gets in the way. Surely that bliss had more to do with love, with the tremulous persuasion that his kisses and caresses and murmured words were proofs of an eagerness for me that could only mean love on his side, than with anything like estrus. Possibly, from the signs, he himself felt that I still needed a bit more preparation, since after a while, if I recall right, he started the motor and drove me to a corner near home.

  If I recall right, it was at that same corner (Union and 34th) that he picked me up the next time. And this time, the Saturday, I was more nervous. It was not that I was greatly afraid of being seen—I could lie. No, I think that I knew now what we were going to do. And I did not want to. Having finally realized what was in the cards, had been in the cards since Lake Crescent, I was scared silly. Maybe he then explained to me in so many words what we were going to do, which should have been a good move in principle; it would have made me more scared temporarily, when I saw the inexorability of what was coming, but it would also give me time to get used to the idea while he drove rapidly along the boulevards, looking for a lonely place to pull off the road. When he found one that satisfied him, he stopped the car and looked steadily at me with a faint amused smile. I must have appeared piteously tense.

  As if resigned, he drew me to him, settling my head on his shoulder, and started asking me about Annie Wright and the different girls there. Like Scheherazade, I was only too pleased to talk. I must have told him about the Quevli sisters, day girls who seemed to be the prize cultivars of the school, or my desk-mate in study hall, Ellin Watts from Portland … Then something prompted me to mention a small jazzy senior who wore bobbly earrings, a lot of lipstick, and a “fun” fur coat and had a peculiar name—De Vere Utter. “Lady Clara Vere de Vere”, some sarcastic teacher had said. He nodded. “Windy fucked Vere Utter,” he observed. The casual way he dropped that, as a datum of passing interest, froze me in his “easy” embrace. What could I answer? I was horror-struck.

  Unless he was one of those men who like to talk dirty to anybody they are about to sleep with, he was exerting himself, probably, in the cheeriest way he knew, to diminish my fears of what, buttoned in his fly, lay in store for me: if a popular Annie Wright senior had done it with his friend Windy, no need for me to feel strange. He could not imagine, I suppose, that this was the first time I had heard that word, though I must have seen it scrawled on Minneapolis fences on the way to the parochial school. Of course I knew what it meant: to fuck was to do it straight, with no love, the way men did with prostitutes. And he was preparing to fuck me. The message had come through clear and strong.

  I did not turn a hair, so far as he could see. But I felt as if I had died. I thought dimly of Vere Utter and how she would take it if she guessed that Windy had “told.” I was distantly sorry for her, seeing her screwed-up little monkey face and short buck teeth with a smear of lipstick on them and the dance step she tapped out on the forward deck of the ferryboat—poor Vere. I don’t seem to have felt the same pity, in anticipation, for myself, that is, to have foreseen what Forrest would be telling Windy about me. Perhaps I was still trying to think that with me it would be different: what he was starting to do as he unbuttoned himself and pulled aside my step-ins would not be f- - -ing.

  In fact, he became very educational, encouraging me to sit up and examine his stiffened organ, which to me looked quite repellent, all flushed and purplish. But in the light of the dashboard, I could not see very well, fortunately. He must have thought it would be interesting for me to look at an adult penis—my first, as by now he must have realized. Then, as I waited, he fished in an inside breast-pocket and took out what I knew to be a “safety.” Still in an instructive mood, even with his erect member (probably he would have made a good parent), he found time to explain to me what it was—the best kind, a Merry Widow—before he bent down and fitted it onto himself, making me watch.

  Of the actual penetration, I remember nothing; it was as if I had been given chloroform. How long it lasted, whether or not we were kissing—everything but the bare fact is gone. It must have hurt, but I have no memory of that or of any other sensations, perhaps a slight sense of being stuffed. Yes, there is also a faint recollection of his instructing me to move, keep step as in dancing, but I am not sure of that. What I am sure of is a single dreadful, dazed moment having to do with the condom. No, Reader, it did not break.

  The act is over; he has slid under the steering-wheel and is standing by his side of the car and holding up a transparent little pouch resembling isinglass that has whitish greenish gray stuff in the bottom. I recognize it as “jism.” Outside it is almost dark, but he is holding the little sack up to a light source—a streetlight, the Marmon’s parking lights, a lit match?—to be sure I can see it well and realize what is inside—the sperm he has ejaculated into it, so as not to ejaculate it in me. I am glad of that, of course, but the main impression is the same as with the swollen penis; the jism is horribly ugly to me, like snot or catarrh, and I have to look away.

  Soon he drove me back to what was turning into “our” corner—34th and Union, at the end of the Madrona car line, near what I think was the Piggly Wiggly store. I got out of the car and quickly walked the four and a half blocks home, past Mary McQueen Street’s house and the little new Catholic church with the modern stations of the cross. Nobody saw him with me, and there were no telltale traces on my step-ins for the maid to find when she washed—if the hymen was punctured, it did not bleed, then or ever. I have no memory of what story I told at home to account for my afternoon, nor of what I thought and felt that evening. Since it was Saturday, did I go with my grandparents after dinner to the current attraction at the Coliseum or the Blue Mouse—Seattle’s quality movie-houses? I wonder what was playing that Thanksgiving week in the year 1926.

  The next day there would have been the inevitable Sunday lunch with my married uncle, Frank, and his wife, Isabel, my uncle Harold, who had to have a special first course because he did not eat tomatoes, and maybe Aunt Alice Carr or Aunt Eva Aronson (both in fact great-aunts). We would have started wit
h a thick slice of tomato on a bed of crabmeat and alligator pear topped by riced egg yolks and cut-up whites mimosa style and Russian or Thousand Island dressing, the whole surrounded with a chiffonade of lettuce, and we would have finished with ice-cream (possibly peppermint at that season, made with candy canes) cranked that morning on the kitchen porch by the old gardener-driver and left to ripen under burlap; in between would have been a main course of—very likely—fried chicken, and at the high point of the meal my grandfather would have said “Allee samee Victor Hugo,” referring to a restaurant in Los Angeles. On this Sunday I would have been spared the after-lunch ride around Lake Washington, for I would have been driven to the dock in good season (a favorite expression with my grandfather) to catch the ferryboat back to the Seminary.

  I wish I knew what was going through my head during that meal. Was I accidentally remembering parts of the day before (“WINDY FUCKED VERE UTTER”) and trying to push the recollection away? Or was I feeling superior to my table-mates because I knew something they would never guess? Since yesterday afternoon I was no longer a virgin—how horrified Aunt Alice Carr with her spindly legs and old-maidish ways would be, how her frizzy head would tremble on the weak stem of her neck! For an insight into my state of mind I try thinking now of Emma Bovary at table with Charles after one of her trysts. It is not hard to guess what she felt. Boredom, obviously, excruciating boredom. And a Seattle Sunday at 712 35th Avenue could have given cards and spades to Yonville L’Abbaye. It was not that my grandfather, taken by himself, was uninteresting to talk to—that applied to my grandmother, too—the tedium was in their life. So, given the fact that I was old for my years and had read Mademoiselle de Maupin, if not yet Madame Bovary, I may conclude that my supreme emotion that Sunday in the bosom of my family was something between exasperated boredom and haughty disdain.

  In any event I would not see them all for several weeks, not until Christmas vacation. And now comes another hiatus in my memory. Of the time in school between Thanksgiving and Christmas I remember only insignificant details having nothing to do with him, such as reading The Merchant of Venice after lights out in my closet by means of a bridge lamp laid on its side and shaded by a bath towel, such as Sir Roger de Coverley and isosceles triangles and Vachel Lindsay’s two nieces whose parents were missionaries in China. On a more personal plane, I remember singing a new (to me) Christmas hymn, “A Virgin Unspotted,” as we marched in procession into chapel, and the strange emotion that came over me as I caroled the words out, my heart singing for joy in Mary Virgin, though Mary I was and virgin I was not. In the Episcopal hymns and liturgy, I was experiencing what psychiatrists call “ideas of reference.” With the Advent hymns now posted in chapel I recognized my Jewish relations and raised my voice for their safety: “Rejoice, rejoice! Em-ma-a-anuel will ransom captive I-i-israel.” Without ever recovering a trace of the faith I had lost in the convent, I was falling in love with the Episcopal church. I did not believe in God’s existence but, more and more, as Christmas approached, I liked the idea of Him, and chapel, morning and evening, became my favorite part of the day.

  Meanwhile I must have been in correspondence with Forrest, whom I still could not call “Forrie.” I feel sure that we were writing to each other because how else did we arrange to meet on that same corner on an afternoon of Christmas vacation? But here comes a peculiar, almost unnerving, thing: not only do I not now remember how we made the date, but until a few days ago I had forgotten that we ever had one. In my memory the image of him standing by the car and holding up that transparent sack of rubber or fishskin was the finale—CURTAIN. If you had asked me, I would have said that I did not see him again till many years later, when I was grown up.

  Well, that is true, but not the way I have been remembering it. The truth is that somehow or other we did make an arrangement to meet. I was on the corner, waiting, and he never came. I do not know how long I waited. I went into a drugstore and pretended to look at magazines; I went into a grocery store—the Piggly Wiggly—and looked at the fruit. I walked up and down the sidewalk. I counted the Madrona streetcars. I dared not linger more than an hour lest people become curious. 34th and Union was not far from where Mark Sullivan lived. I promised myself that if the Marmon had not appeared when three streetcars had reached the end of the line I would give up. I tried counting up to a thousand. I decided that he must have come while my back was turned, in the drugstore, so it could be my own fault. Finally, stopping every few steps to look over my shoulder, I walked slowly to the next corner, took a last look behind me, and then went rapidly home. In my memory this day, too, as it comes back to me, feels like a Saturday, and I have the feeling that I posted myself on the same spot the next day, in case there had been a mistake. But the next day I did not wait so long.

  Why didn’t I telephone him? At fourteen and a half, I did not have the courage; actually, I am not sure I would today. He had told me not even to write to him at home. If I had tried to reach him at the Phi Delt house, I would have got some pledge—besides, they were on Christmas vacation. There was nothing to do but wait till I got back to school. Then if he did not write me, I would write him. If today there is something “philosophical” in my attitude to grief or disappointment, it may have been born then.

  I think he wrote me when I was back at Annie Wright, but I may have sent him a cry of wild reproach to which his letter was an answer. In any case, it was short, the shortest he had yet penned, and offered no real excuse. He was sorry but he had been “held up”; for the rest, it was one of those letters of commonplaces of the “Hope you are fine and painting the school red” type. Something like that. And no “Hasta la vista.” But the awful thing was that it was not signed. Not even a pusillanimous “F,” which he had put on his last letter, I now seem to recall. Just a wavy line after the last sentence.

  The letter cut off all hope. It told me, among other unbearable things, that my grandfather’s judgment had been right. The letter was like a signed, or, rather, unsigned, confession. And I was too young to be able to pardon him, which might have sweetened the bitter dose for me. Children do not pardon. Far from forgiving, I could not even understand. I knew that men tired of girls who gave themselves too easily, but so suddenly, so soon? Had I failed, in the car, to move the way you were supposed to? And, having failed on my first trial, would I ever get a chance to do better?

  “Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned” I read with interest in some book I had spirited into study hall. But the saying did not seem to be apposite. I had no means of dealing with the pain I was feeling; nothing like it had ever happened to me. I was in torture, but there was no one I could tell, no bosom I could fling myself on. My grandmother was too old and unsympathetic, and anyway my lying ruled her out. I could not tell a teacher, least of all the severe Miss Dorothy Atkinson, the English teacher with puffs of ash-blond hair over her ears and glasses on a chain whom I admired. Tears did not help without a comforter; I would have preferred to howl, but you could not do that at the Seminary, even if you did not have a roommate the walls were too thin. I did not consider suicide; that came later, when I no longer had a reason for it.

  My sole resort, as often happens, was him, the cause of the pain. I could write to him, and I did, a very long letter, which I spent hours revising and maybe polishing since it was the last, I guessed, that he would ever receive from me. The burden of it was that I hated and despised him: I was grateful to have seen him finally in his true colors so that I would never have to see him again. While loosing the vials of my wrath, I may have alluded to his faults of spelling—I hope so. I was desperately burning my bridges, so as to give myself no encourage­ment for expecting an answer.

  In full awareness of the consequences, I folded the thick screed into a big envelope and addressed it to him. But before putting on the stamp I wrote “I love you” in the place the stamp would cover. Not altogether satisfied with that, I carefully turned it upside down, which in stamp language meant �
��Look underneath.” Then I gave the letter to be mailed. In terms of gambling, it was a weakly hedged bet I was placing. The chances of a grown man’s looking under a postage stamp were piteously small, even with the nudging of the wrong-way-up Lincoln or Washington. Boarding-school-girl code anyhow—how would he know it? The only way he could have discovered those three little words would have been if the stamp had fallen off the envelope. My message had the same fate as the note to the fairies I had put into a rose in Uncle John’s garden in Duluth one summer evening.

  My love slowly withdrew from him, like a puddle drying up. For months, maybe a year, I kept looking for the Marmon whenever I went downtown in Seattle, especially in the vicinity of Seneca and Spring Streets, where I felt his numen at the wheel of every auto­mobile. Sometimes I would think I saw the car’s hood, heavy-set on the high chassis, coming toward me, but when I looked more closely, the car, although gray and a roadster, would be a different make. There could not have been many Marmons in Seattle.

  Were there many Forrest Crosbys? Luckily not, perhaps. Yet he was scarcely an original. He was banal, even in the hold he had on my awakening sensual imagination. It was not only the bright-blue eyes, the crisp hair, the pursed, amused mouth, but also, I think, the car, the pipe, whatever shoes and socks he wore. It was his accessories that seduced me, as in an advertisement, and they included his name, which, like so many names in Seattle (Armour Spaulding!), seemed pseudonymous, creations of a press agent.

  As they said of such men a bit later, he was a wolf, but a wolf with consistency of style—apparently he did not find sheep’s clothing becoming. What was unusual about him, probably, was the priority of style over substance, also the fact (which might seem to be contradictory) that he “wanted only one thing.” Most men, in the end, want much more.

  I suppose I am sketching the outlines of a Don Giovanni, one of the few I have known. That would explain what he “saw” in me. It was not my being pretty (I am not sure I was, and, till the senior yearbook, no photo exists to say yes or no) or “fresh.” It made no difference whether I was intelligent or stupid, passionate or cold. In the “boundary situation” (Karl Jaspers) constituted by the chill seat of a roadster, those qualities buttered no parsnips. What he wanted from me was what Don Giovanni wanted from fat and thin, chambermaid and lady, old and young: “il piacer di porla in lista”—that was all there was to it. That his organ and sperm repelled me suggests that on my side the attraction did not go deep despite the superficial power it exerted. It was like a kind of hypnotism, which I believe does not go deep either. I obeyed his command to open my legs, having gone too far not to finish the task, but it was chiefly my muscles that submitted; my mind held itself apart, not finding him, to my surprise, very interesting. In the same way, a hypnotist can make you carry out any quantity of orders but he cannot make you do anything that goes against your nature. Just as nothing can force us to like a hated vegetable, so I could never respond in depth to the man made manifest in those colorless letters. Hasta la vista.