Mary McCarthy

by Mary McCarthy

  No, it was not really the humanitarian side of socialism that touched her; though she was moved by human misery when it was brought to her attention, if she went to buy a suit at Bonwit Teller, she was never troubled by irrelevant memories of the slums she had passed through on her way. Her aunt had been one of those pious women who could not look at a garbage pail without being reminded of the fact that there were people in the world who had nothing to eat. “It’s a sin to throw that away,” she was always saying, and her hyperestheticism on this point allowed her to practice an extreme parsimony with a good conscience. But she herself, thank God, was not like that. In this respect, she took after her father, who in his rather uninspired way had been fond of good cigars, good Bourbon, eau lilas végétale, crabmeat, alligator pears, and hotel suites. It was curious, she thought, that all the Puritan penny-pinching should have been on the Catholic side of her family, while her father, that stern Yankee, with his thin skin, his methodical habits, his civic-mindedness, his devout sense of what was proper, should have spent his life buying encyclopedia sets, worthless real estate, patents on fantastic inventions, and have died, to everyone’s astonishment, overdrawn at the bank. What a strange childhood she had had! (“No wonder,” Dr. James sometimes murmured, in a slightly awestruck voice, “no wonder,” meaning no wonder she had turned out so badly. And it was true, she supposed, Freud would have labored in vain if she had not ended up, sobbing, on a psychoanalyst’s blue couch. She was a real Freudian classic, and as such faintly monstrous, improbable, like one of those French plays that demonstrate as if on a blackboard the axioms of the Romantic movement. It was not merely a distaste for the obvious that had led both her and the doctor to avoid, insofar as it was possible, lengthy discussions of her childhood. The subject frightened them both, for it suggested to them that the universe is mechanical, utterly predictable, frozen, and this in its own way is quite as terrible as the notion that the universe is chaotic. It is essential for our happiness, she thought, to have both the pattern and the loose ends, to roughen the glassy hexameter with the counter-rhythm of speech.)

  Up to the time her mother had died, she had been such an elegant little girl. She remembered her ermine neckpiece and the ermine muff that went with it, her two baby rings with the diamonds in them, the necklace of seed pearls. All a little on the ostentatious side, she admitted, but it had been an era of bad taste. Then, after the flu was over, and mamma did not come home from the hospital, Aunt Clara had moved in, the rings were put in the vault (to keep for you until you’re older), the ermine set wore out, the velocipede broke, the white sand darkened in the sandpile, there were prunes and rice pudding on the table, and the pretty little girl who looked (everybody said) so much like her mother was changed into a stringy, bow-legged child with glasses and braces on her teeth, long underwear, high shoes, blue serge jumpers that smelled, and a brown beaver hat two sizes too big for her.

  Ah, she said to herself now, I reject this middle-class tragedy, this degenerated Victorian novel where I am Jane Eyre or somebody in Dickens or Kipling or brave little Elsie Dinsmore fainting over the piano. I reject the whole pathos of the changeling, the orphan, the stepchild. I reject this trip down the tunnel of memory which resembles nothing so much as a trip down the Red Mill at Coney Island, with my aunt and her attributive razor strop substituting for Lizzie Borden and her ax. I reject all those tableaux of estrangement: my father in his smoking jacket at the card table with his nightly game of solitaire forever laid out before him, my aunt with her novel by Cardinal Wiseman that she is reading for the fifteenth time, and myself with the cotton handkerchief that I must hem and re-hem because the stitches are never small enough; I deny the afternoon I deliver my prize-winning essay at the Town Auditorium and there is no family there to applaud me because my father is away on a hunting trip, and my aunt, having just beaten me for my error in winning the prize (“You are too stuck-up already”), is at home in her bedroom having hysterics; and also the scene at the summer resort where the lady looks up from the bridge table and utters her immortal tag line, “Surely, Mr. Sargent, this isn’t your daughter!” It is all too apropos for acceptance.

  Yet what were you going to do? You could not treat your life-history as though it were an inferior novel and dismiss it with a snubbing phrase. It had after all been like that. Her peculiar tragedy (if she had one) was that her temperament was unable to assimilate her experience; the raw melodrama of those early years was a kind of daily affront to her skeptical, prosaic intelligence. She remembered the White Russian gentleman she had met once at a party. They were asking him about his escape from the Soviets, and he had reached the point in his story where he saw his brother shot by the Bolsheviks. Here, at the most harrowing moment of his narrative, he faltered, broke off, and finally smiled, an apologetic, self-depreciatory smile which declared, “I know that this is one of the clichés of the Russians in exile. They have all seen their brothers or sisters shot before their eyes. Excuse me, please, for having had such a commonplace and at the same time such an unlikely experience.” That terrible smile had filled her with love and pity; she had “recognized” him at once, and afterwards on the street she had kissed him, because she too knew what it was to have a sense of artistic decorum that like a hoity-toity wife was continually showing one’s poor biography the door.

  If only she could have been disinherited in some subtle, psychological way. . . . If her alienation from her father could have been expressed in any terms but those crude, shameful ones of food, money, clothes. If that tactless lady’s question had not been written quite so large in all the faces she remembered. She had seen it a thousand times, wherever she went with her father, in the eyes of the Pullman porter, the traveling salesman, the waiter in the ladies’ annex at the Athletic Club downtown. How she had looked forward to those excursions with him, and how disastrously they had always ended! It was impossible for her to be a credit to him, to be anything but an anomaly, the Catholic child of a Protestant father, the shabby daughter of a prosperous lawyer, the underbred Irish offspring of a genteel New England parent. Her appearance, her conversation, her appetite—everything was wrong. The sight of a menu would be like a poem to her (buckwheat cakes and country sausage with Real Vermont Maple Syrup); inevitably, she would order too much to eat. But when the food came, her shrunken stomach could not accommodate it: a few bites would instantly bring on that stuffed feeling, and she would set down her fork in despair, seeing the feast on her plate as an image of the Unattainable. Her father never reproved her for this, but each time it happened, his lean face with its prominent lantern jaw would set in sharper lines, and she would know that he was grieved, both on her account and his own. He would have liked to “make it up to her” for the loneliness, the harsh, antiquated discipline that his sister-in-law had brought into the house, but it was impossible. Aunt Clara could be bodily left at home but her spirit presided over her niece like a grim familiar demon.

  In a way, it had been better at home, for there the social and religious differences had been given a kind of spatial definition and it was easier to move about. Upstairs there were red votive lamps, altars, and holy pictures (the Sacred Heart, Veronica’s veil with the eyes that followed you about the room, Saint Cecilia in sepia striking a heavenly chord on an anachronistic piano), a rich, emotional décor that made the downstairs with its China shepherdesses, Tiffany glass, bronze smoking sets, and family photographs look matter-of-fact and faded, just as the stories in the Century in the magazine rack in the living room seemed unendurably tame after the religious fiction she found in her aunt’s favorite periodicals, where people were always being bitten by tarantulas or cobras, struck by lightning, plagued with leprosy or cholera, cursed in the most ingenious and striking ways by an implacable and resourceful God. It was as if the Catholic Church began on the landing, where her father’s suite branched off from the stairway that continued on up to her own room, her aunt’s room, her mother’s empty room with the French perfume slowly evaporating
in the silver atomizers on the dressing-table. Her father never entered her bedroom (except once, with the doctor, when she was sick), yet she knew that he was fond of her, thought her clever because she got high marks and talked back to the sisters. It was some peculiar delicacy that kept him from intruding, the same delicacy that made him say, “Aunt Clara knows what’s good for you,” “You must do what the Mother Superior says.”

  If he had been truly indifferent to her, she thought, her position would have been more tolerable. She could have set herself to win his love, or fought him as she did her aunt. But she could not win what she had already, and she could not fight him either. For a long time, she believed that perhaps he did not notice, and she began to behave badly in order to attract his attention. She ran away from home and spent the night in a museum, behind a cast of the Laocoön, where an attendant found her the next day and immediately called a policeman. The idea on the surface of her mind was that she wanted to be put in an orphan asylum, but in the end she confessed her name and allowed herself to be led home, because the thing she really desired was to hear her father say, “Why are you suffering so? Is it so terrible for you here that you honestly cannot stand it?” When the policeman brought her in, her father’s face flushed, and she knew that she had disgraced him. He did not scold her, but neither did he ask any questions. “Get her something to eat,” he said to the maid, while the young policeman shuffled his feet, glancing from father to daughter with that expression she was so familiar with, not knowing whether to leave, because the case seemed somehow unsolved. She watched his eyes take in the living room. She knew precisely what he was saying to himself. “Good home, nice kid, prominent family, what the hell is the matter here? Maybe I was wrong about the kid. Maybe she’s the nigger in the woodpile.”

  And she did not blame the policeman for thinking this. In fact, she expected him to think it. All the way home on the streetcar, seeing him begin to like her, seeing the sympathy spring up (her old man probably beats her), she had known that it was merely a question of time, that as soon as he met her father, a stupid, suspicious look would come over his cop’s face, and he would feel a little angry and ridiculous, hurt in his professional pride, as if somebody had picked his pocket. Nevertheless, when he had offered to buy her an ice-cream cone at the drugstore at the end of the car line, she had accepted and gobbled it up quickly, just as later on, she would gobble up friendship, love, compliments, with the full prescience of what would come afterwards, the reproachful look, the averted head, the “You are not what you seemed.”

  Yet what was she to have done? How explain to the policeman a thing she hardly understood herself, that her father’s being a good man was precisely what was the matter, that she was the victim of his conscience, as Isaac nearly was of Abraham’s? But here there was no God to step in and say, “That’s enough, Mr. Sargent. You have convinced me that you are a man of honor, that you practice religious tolerance and pay your debt to the dead. You may now give in to your natural feelings and get that woman out of your house.” Her father had never liked Aunt Clara. “Your mother,” he said once, succinctly, “was cut from a different bolt of cloth.” This, she recognized, was for him the sustaining myth, the classic delusion of the frontier, where a pretty woman is a pretty woman, poverty is no crime, and all the nonsense of family and religion and connections has been left behind in the East, and you do not look down on anybody for his race, except of course a Chinaman or a Jap. You do not permit yourself to remember New England and the Irish workers thronging off the boats, the anti-Catholic riots in Boston; you forget your mother, who would draw aside her skirts when a nun passed, and your father with his stack of Know-Nothing pamphlets. If you are to cut down the forests, lay the trolley tracks, send up the skyscrapers, you need partners in business and domesticity, and there is no time to be choosy. You cannot pause to consider that your wife’s grandfather is the historical enemy, the jostling, elbowing immigrant whose cheap labor power pushed your own father out into Illinois and sent you as a young man hurrying farther West, where there was still a little space left.

  Her mother’s youth and beauty had tempered the amalgam. Nobody could have foreseen that she would die and bequeath her husband Aunt Clara, whose complaints, whose tears, whose blue-white mottled complexion, whose medals and dirty scapulars would put his egalitarian principles to the severest kind of test. Aunt Clara was, in truth, more than he had bargained for, and a more realistic man would have felt himself perfectly justified in calling the deal off, repossessing his daughter, bringing her up according to his own ideas, and letting the Pope go hang. Yet the very injustice of the legacy, its unwarranted, unforeseeable character, had moved her father to accept it. The fact that Aunt Clara was personally distasteful to him put her beyond the pale of his criticism, rendered her untouchable, sacred, just as the very real aversion he felt toward Catholic doctrine drove him to punish his daughter if her mark in Catechism was low. She understood this now very well, for she had inherited from him the twisted sense of honor that was always overpaying its debts, extorting from herself and from others the coin of unnecessary suffering to buy indulgence for a secret guilt, an unacknowledged shame.

  Not until she was fifteen, however, did she guess the real nature of her father’s sin, and the bitterness of his protracted penance. She saw then that to have been locked in closets, beaten, forbidden to read, have a doll, go to the movies or the pantomime was as nothing compared to the agony of permitting these things to happen to your child in the interests of a religious tolerance that you did not really feel.

  He had taken her to a dance at the house of one of her Catholic cousins. It was her first evening party. She wore a pink moiré dress with a big, dark-red velvet bow. She was new to the crowd of Irish boys home for Thanksgiving from a Catholic prep school and they kept cutting in and cutting in and bringing her glasses of weak punch from the buffet. Suddenly, her father had shoved his way past her admirers and snatched the glass from her hands. “Get your coat on,” he exclaimed in a strange voice, and began to push her toward the door. She was nearly crying when they reached the street, but he took her by the shoulders and shook her. “God damn it,” he said, “you ought to have more sense than to let those little micks get you drunk. Can’t you see they’re trying to make a fool of you?” “Why, father,” she said, “that’s not true. They liked me. They thought I was the prettiest girl . . .” “Stop your nonsense,” he shouted. “Don’t you know that they’re all laughing at you?” She had walked sullenly along beside him telling herself that it was hopeless, that she would never have a chance to get married if her father was going to act like this. At the same time, she had sensed that he was right; there had been something degrading about her success. The boys were awfully common, with their red faces and black hair; the whole party was common. Yet it was strange that her father should have noticed this, for he never made social distinctions. She pondered the word “micks,” which came so unexpectedly from him, who had taught her that you must never say nigger or sheeny or dago. All at once, she understood; it was as if he had told her the story of his life, and she was both sorry for him and frightened. In that terrible look on his face, in his hoarse voice, she read the living history of the Irish, the Jews, the Negroes. She felt closer to him than ever before; yet there was no doubt in her mind that her allegiance belonged elsewhere. Let her father vote for Hoover! She was for Al Smith, who used such bad grammar and was married to Mrs. Smith, who looked like all her own dreadful Irish relations rolled into one large woman and decorated with a string of beads. It would have been pleasanter, of course, if Al Smith had been a gentleman, if the Negroes were not colored, and the Jews were not Jewish. Nevertheless . . . Her heart quickened with romantic defiance. She shook off her father’s arm and stepped proudly into the car.

  But by this time she was free. Aunt Clara had been turned into a housekeeper, to whom no one paid any attention, she herself was in her second year at a good boarding school, she had a clothes allowance
and charge accounts, took her friends to lunch at the country club, went to the movies and the theater, and read whatever she pleased. She had lost her faith. That was what had done it. In her first year of high school, she came home from the convent one day and announced that she was an atheist. Her aunt had had a fit of hysterics and sent for the parish priest. Her father had said nothing, but when she refused to go to Mass the following Sunday, he picked her up and carried her out to the car, while she kicked at his legs and screamed. “You can send me there,” she kept repeating, “but you can’t make me go in.” At the Catholic church she declined to get out of the car. The chauffeur drove her around for an hour and then brought her home. “I didn’t go,” she said. That night her father called her into the library. “You’re old enough now,” he said, “to know what you want. I can’t make you go to church. I’ve tried to have you brought up a good Catholic because I thought your mother would want it so. I’ve let your aunt have her way, though I’ve told her she was being too strict with you, that there was bound to be an explosion. I can’t do any more.” He paused. “Are you willing to finish out the year at the convent?” She knew that she must take a strong line. “No,” she said firmly. “All right.” He smiled for the first time. “You’ll have to be tutored then till I can find a good school for you. I don’t want you to fall behind.” “I won’t,” she declared intensely, promising herself that she would repay his confidence in her by having a brilliant career. A great writer, an actress, an ambassador’s gifted wife. Perhaps he would like it best if she were to study for the bar. But no, that was out of the question; women lawyers wore flat-heeled shoes. A great lady of some sort who spoke six languages fluently, Diane de Poitiers, Ninon, or Margaret of Navarre.