“You’re just like Lord Byron, brilliant but unsound.”
I heard the pointer being set down and the drawing being torn crisply twice across, but I could not look up. Trembling with excitement and a kind of holy terror, I sank back in my seat. Up to this moment, I had believed shallowly, with Napoleon, that the day of one’s First Communion was the happiest day of one’s life; now, in the glory of this sentence, I felt that petit-bourgeois notion give a sudden movement inside me and quite distinctly die. Throughout the rest of the class, I sat motionless, simulating meekness, while my classmates shot me glances of wonder, awe, and congratulation, as though I had suddenly been struck by a remarkable disease, or been canonized, or transfigured. Madame Barclay’s pronouncement, which I kept repeating to myself under my breath, had for us girls a kind of final and majestic certainty. She was the severest and most taciturn of our teachers. Her dark brows met in the middle; her skin was a pure olive; her upper lip had a faint mustache; she was the iron and authority of the convent. She tolerated no infractions, overlooked nothing, was utterly and obdurately fair, had no favorites; but her rather pointed face had the marks of suffering, as though her famous discipline had scored it as harshly as one of our papers. She had a bitter and sarcastic wit, and had studied at the Sorbonne. Before this day, I had once or twice dared to say to myself that Madame Barclay liked me. Her dark, quite handsome eyes would sometimes move in my direction as her lips prepared an aphorism or a satiric gibe. Yet hardly had I estimated the look, weighed and measured it to store it away in my memory book of requited affections, when a stinging penalty would recall me from my dream and I could no longer be sure. Now, however, there was no doubt left. The reproof was a declaration of love as plain as the sentence on the blackboard, which shimmered slightly before my eyes. My happiness was a confused exaltation in which the fact that I was Lord Byron and the fact that I was loved by Madame Barclay, the most puzzling nun in the convent, blended in a Don Juanesque triumph.
In the refectory that noon, publicity was not wanting to enrich this moment. Insatiable, I could hardly wait for the weekend, to take Madame Barclay’s words as though they had been a prize. With the generosity of affluence, I spoke to myself of sharing this happiness, this honor, with my grandfather. Surely, this would make up to him for any worry or difficulty I had caused him. At the same time, it would have the practical effect of explaining me a little to him. Phrases about my prototype rang in my head: “that unfortunate genius,” “that turbulent soul,” “that gifted and erratic nature.”
My grandfather turned dark red when he heard the news. His forehead grew knotty with veins; he swore; he looked strange and young; it was the first time I had ever seen him angry. Argument and explanation were useless. For my grandfather, history had interposed no distance between Lord Byron and himself. Though the incestuous poet had died forty years before my grandfather was born, the romantic perspective was lacking. That insularity of my grandfather’s that kept him intimate with morals and denied the reality of the exotic made him judge the poet as he judged himself or one of his neighbors—that is, on the merit of his actions. He was on the telephone at once, asking the Mother Superior in a thundering, courtroom voice what right one of her sisters had to associate his innocent granddaughter with that degenerate blackguard, Byron. On Monday, Madame Barclay, with tight-drawn lips, told her class that she had a correction to make: Mary McCarthy did not resemble Lord Byron in any particular; she was neither brilliant, loose-living, nor unsound.
The interviews between my grandfather and Madame MacIllvra came to an end. To that remarkable marriage of minds the impediment had at last been discovered. But from this time on, Madame Barclay’s marks of favor to me grew steadily more distinct, while the look of suffering tightened on her face, till some said she had cancer (a theory supported by the yellowness of her skin) and some said she was being poisoned by an antipathy to the Mother Superior.
C.Y.E.
NEAR THE CORNER of Fourteenth Street and Fourth Avenue, there is a store called Cye Bernard. I passed it the other day on my way to the Union Square subway station. To my intense surprise, a heavy blush spread over my face and neck, and my insides contorted in that terrible grimace of shame that is generally associated with hangovers. I averted my eyes from the sign and hurried into the subway, my head bent so that no observer should discover my secret identity, which until that moment I had forgotten myself. Now I pass this sign every day, and it is always a question whether I shall look at it or not. Usually I do, but hastily, surreptitiously, with an ineffective air of casualness, lest anybody suspect that I am crucified there on that building, hanging exposed in black script lettering to advertise bargains in men’s haberdashery.
The strangest part about it is that this unknown clothier on Fourteenth Street should not only incorporate in his name the mysterious, queerly spelled nickname I was given as a child in the convent, but that he should add to this the name of my patron saint, St. Bernard of Clairvaux, whom I chose for my special protector at a time when I was suffering from the nickname. It is nearly enough to convince me that life is a system of recurrent pairs, the poison and the antidote being eternally packaged together by some considerate heavenly druggist. St. Bernard, however, was, from my point of view, never so useful as the dog that bears his name, except in so far as he represented the contemplative, bookish element in the heavenly hierarchy, as opposed, say, to St. Martin of Tours, St. Francis Xavier or St. Aloysius of Gonzaga, who was of an ineffable purity and died young. The life of action was repellent to St. Bernard, though he engaged in it from time to time; on the other hand, he was not a true exalté—he was, in short, a sedentary man, and it was felt, in the convent, I think, that he was a rather odd choice for an eleven-year-old girl, the nuns themselves expressing some faint bewilderment and concern, as older people do when a child is presented with a great array of toys and selects from among them a homely and useful object.
It was marvelous, I said to myself that day on the subway, that I could have forgotten so easily. In the official version of my life the nickname does not appear. People have asked me, now and then, whether I have ever had a nickname and I have always replied, No, it is funny but I do not seem to be the type that gets one. I have even wondered about it a little myself, asking, Why is it that I have always been Mary, world without end, Amen, feeling a faint pinch of regret and privation, as though a cake had been cut and no favor, not even the old maid’s thimble or the miser’s penny, been found in my piece. How political indeed is the personality, I thought. What coalitions and cabals the party in power will not make to maintain its uncertain authority! Nothing is sacred. The past is manipulated to serve the interests of the present. For any bureaucracy, amnesia is convenient. The name of Trotsky drops out of the chapter on the revolution in the Soviet textbooks—what shamelessness, we say, while in the meantime our discarded selves languish in the Lubianka of the unconscious. But a moment comes at last, after the régime has fallen, after all interested parties are dead, when the archives are opened and the old ghosts walk, and history must be rewritten in the light of fresh discoveries.
It was happening to me then, as I sat frozen in my seat, staring at the picture of Miss Subways, February 1943, who loves New York and spends her spare time writing to her two officer-brothers in the Army and Navy. The heavy doors of the mind swung on their hinges. I was back in the convent, a pale new girl sitting in the front of the study hall next to a pretty, popular eighth-grader, whom I bored and who resented having me for a desk-mate. I see myself perfectly: I am ambitious, I wish to make friends with the most exciting and powerful girls; at the same time, I am naïve, without stratagems, for I think that this project of mine will be readily accomplished, that I have only to be myself. The first rebuffs startle me. I look around and see that there is a social pyramid here and that I and my classmates are on the bottom. I study the disposition of stresses and strains and discover that two girls, Elinor Henehan and Mary Heinrichs, are important, and that
their approval is essential to my happiness.
There were a great many exquisite and fashionable-looking girls in the convent, girls with Irish or German names, who used make-up in secret, had suitors, and always seemed to be on the verge of a romantic elopement. There were also some very pretty Protestant girls, whose personal charms were enhanced for us by the exoticism of their religion—the nuns telling us that we should always be especially considerate of them because they were Protestants, and, so to speak, our guests, with the result that we treated them reverently, like French dolls. These two groups made up the elite of the convent; the nuns adored them for their beauty, just as we younger girls did; and they enjoyed far more réclame than the few serious students who were thought to have the vocation.
Elinor Henehan and Mary Heinrichs fell into neither category. They were funny, lazy, dangling girls, fourteen or fifteen years old, with baritone voices, very black hair, and an insouciant attitude toward convent life. It was said that they came from east of the mountains. Elinor Henehan was tall and bony, with horn-rimmed glasses; Mary Heinrichs was shorter and plump. Their blue serge uniforms were always a mess, the collars and cuffs haphazardly sewn on and worn a day or so after they ought to have been sent to the laundry. They broke rules constantly, talking in study hall, giggling in chapel.
Yet out of these unpromising personal materials, they had created a unique position for themselves. They were the school clowns. And like all clowns they had made a shrewd bargain with life, exchanging dignity for power, and buying with servility to their betters immunity from the reprisals of their equals or inferiors. For the upper school they travestied themselves, exaggerating their own odd physical characteristics, their laziness, their eccentric manner of talking. With the lower school, it was another story: we were the performers, the school the audience, they the privileged commentators from the royal box. Now it was our foibles, our vanities, our mannerisms that were on display, and the spectacle was apparently so hilarious that it was a continual challenge to the two girls’ self-control. They lived in a recurrent spasm of mirth. On the playground, at the dinner-table, laughter would dangerously overtake them; one would whisper to the other and then a wordless rocking would begin, till finally faint anguished screams were heard, and the nun in charge clapped her clapper for silence.
What was unnerving about this laughter—unnerving especially for the younger girls—was its general, almost abstract character. More often than not, we had no idea what it was that Elinor and Mary were laughing at. A public performance of any sort—a recital, a school play—instantly reduced them to jelly. Yet what was there about somebody’s humble and pedestrian performance of The Merry Peasant that was so uniquely comic? Nobody could tell, least of all the performer. To be the butt of this kind of joke was a singularly painful experience, for you were never in a position to turn the tables, to join in the laughter at your own expense, because you could not possibly pretend to know what the joke was. Actually, as I see now, it was the intimacy of the two girls that set their standard: from the vantage point of their private world, anything outside seemed strange and ludicrous. It was our very existence they laughed at, as the peasant laughs at the stranger from another province. The occasions of mirth—a request for the salt, a trip to the dictionary in the study hall—were mere pretexts; our personalities in themselves were incredible to them. At the time, however, it was very confusing. Their laughter was a kind of crazy compass that was steering the school. Nobody knew, ever, where the whirling needle would stop, and many of us lived in a state of constant apprehension, lest it should point to our desk, lest we become, if only briefly, the personification of all that was absurd, the First Cause of this cosmic mirth.
Like all such inseparable friends, they delighted in nicknames, bestowing them in godlike fashion, as though by renaming their creatures they could perform a new act of creation, a secular baptism. And as at the baptismal font we had passed from being our parents’ children to being God’s children, so now we passed from God’s estate to a societal trolls’ world presided over by these two unpredictable deities. They did not give nicknames to everybody. You had to have some special quality to be singled out by Elinor and Mary, but what that quality was only Elinor and Mary could tell. I saw very soon (the beginnings of wisdom) that I had two chances of finding an honorable place in the convent system: one was to escape being nicknamed altogether, the other was to earn for myself an appellation that, while humorous, was still benevolent; rough, perhaps, but tender. On the whole, I would have preferred the first alternative, as being less chancy. Months passed, and no notice was taken of me; my anxiety diminished; it seemed as though I might get my wish.
They broke the news to me one night after study hall. We were filing out of the large room when Elinor stepped out of the line to speak to me. “We have got one for you,” she said. “Yes?” I said calmly, for really (I now saw) I had known it all along, known that there was something about me that would inevitably appeal to these two strange girls. I stiffened up in readiness, feeling myself to be a sort of archery target: there was no doubt that they could hit me (I was an easy mark), but, pray God, it be one of the larger concentric circles, not, oh Blessed Virgin, the red, tender bull’s-eye at the heart. I could not have imagined what was in store for me. “Cye,” said Elinor and began to laugh, looking at me oddly because I did not laugh too. “Si?” I asked, puzzled. I was a new girl, it was true, but I did not come from the country. “C-Y-E,” said Elinor, spelling. “But what does it mean?” I asked the two of them, for Mary had now caught up with her. They shook their dark heads and laughed. “Oh no,” they said. “We can’t tell you. But it’s very, very good. Isn’t it?” they asked each other. “It’s one of our best.”
I saw at once that it was useless to question them. They would never tell me, of course, and I would only make myself ridiculous, even more Cye-like, if I persisted. It occurred to me that if I showed no anxiety, they would soon forget about it, but my shrewdness was no match for theirs. The next day it was all over the school. It was called to me on the baseball field, when the young nun was at bat; it was whispered from head to head down the long refectory table at dinner. It rang through the corridors in the dormitory. “What does it mean?” I would hear a girl ask. Elinor or Mary would whisper in her ear, and the girl would cast me a quick glance, and then laugh. Plainly, they had hit me off to a T, and as I saw this my curiosity overcame my fear and my resentment. I no longer cared how derogatory the name might be; I would stand anything. I said to myself, if only I could know it. If only I had some special friend who could find out and then tell me. But I was new and a little queer, anyway, it seemed; I had no special friends, and now it was part of the joke that the whole school should know, and know that I wanted to know and not tell me. My isolation, which had been obscure, was now conspicuous, and, as it were, axiomatic. Nobody could ever become my friend, because to do so would involve telling me, and Elinor and Mary would never forgive that.
It was up to me to guess it, and I would lie in bed at night, guessing wildly, as though against time, like the miller’s upstart daughter in Rumpelstiltskin. Outlandish phrases would present themselves: “Catch your elbow,” “Cheat your end.” Or, on the other hand, sensible ones that were humiliating: “Clean your ears.” One night I got up and poured water into the china basin and washed my ears in the dark, but when I looked at the washcloth in the light the next morning, it was perfectly clean. And in any case, it seemed to me that the name must have some more profound meaning. My fault was nothing ordinary that you could do something about, like washing your ears. Plainly, it was something immanent and irremediable, a spiritual taint. And though I could not have told precisely what my wrongness consisted in, I felt its existence almost tangible during those nights, and knew that it had always been with me, even in the other school, where I had been popular, good at games, good at dramatics; I had always had it, a kind of miserable effluvium of the spirit that the ordinary sieves of report cards and w
eekly confessions had been powerless to catch.
Now I saw that I could never, as I had hoped, belong to the convent’s inner circles, not to the tier of beauty, nor to the tier of manners and good deportment, which was signalized by wide moiré ribbons, awarded once a week, blue, green, or pink, depending on one’s age, that were worn in a sort of bandolier style, crosswise from shoulder to hip. I could take my seat in the dowdy tier of scholarship, but my social acquaintance would be limited to a few frowzy little girls of my own age who were so insignificant, so contemptible, that they did not even know what my nickname stood for. Even they, I thought, were better off than I, for they knew their place, they accepted the fact that they were unimportant little girls. No older girl would bother to jeer at them, but in me there was something overweening, over-eager, over-intense, that had brought upon me the hateful name. Now my only desire was to be alone, and in the convent this was difficult, for the nuns believed that solitude was appropriate for anchorites, but for growing girls, unhealthy. I went to the library a great deal and read all of Cooper, and Stoddard’s Lectures. I became passionately religious, made a retreat with a fiery missionary Jesuit, spent hours on my knees in adoration of the Blessed Sacrament, but even in the chapel, the name pursued me: glancing up at the cross, I would see the initials, I.N.R.I.; the name that had been given Christ in mockery now mocked me, for I was not a prig and I knew that my sufferings were ignoble and had nothing whatever in common with God’s. And, always, there was no avoiding the communal life, the older girls passing as I crept along the corridor with a little knot of my classmates. “Hello, Cye.”
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