Mary McCarthy's Collected Memoirs: Memories of a Catholic Girlhood, How I Grew, and Intellectual Memoirs (29 page)

Much of my adolescent boredom and discontent sprang from the fact that I had absolutely nothing to do but read and play the Victrola. I was not allowed in the kitchen, except to fix a sandwich for my lunch, because of an historic mess I had made with a batch of marshmallows; as with the dawn-colored dress, I had been too ambitious for a beginner. All I know today of sewing I learned in boarding school and, earlier, from the nuns in the convent, and the only person who was willing to show me anything about cooking was the old gardener-chauffeur, who used to come in and make German-fried potatoes for his lunch. On the cook’s day out, he would let me watch him and then try it myself. In our family now, we have a dish called, in his memory, chauffeur-fried potatoes; they are very good.

My grandmother herself did not eat lunch as a regular thing, and at twelve o’clock every day, and sometimes earlier, my audience was over. She would get up from her chair and retire to the bathroom, shutting the door behind her. In a minute, her bedroom door closed, the nursery door closed. From then on till a time that varied between two and three o’clock, she was invisible; no one was allowed to disturb her. She was getting ready to go downtown. This sortie was the climax of her day. Her bedroom door would open, revealing her in festive array—every outfit she wore, like every meal, was a surprise. The car would be waiting, in front of the old carriage block, and we would set off, sometimes stopping for Aunt Rosie. The next two or three hours would be spent in the stores, trying on, ransacking counters. My grandmother was not much interested in bargains, though we never missed a sale at Helen Igoe’s or Magnin’s; what she cared about was the “latest wrinkle” in dresses or furs or notions—news from the fashion front. During these hours, she reached her highest point of laconic animation and sparkle; she shopped like an epigrammatist at the peak of form, and the extravagance of her purchases matched her brilliant hair and bobbing feathers and turkey walk and pursy pink cheeks.

But at a quarter of five, wherever we were, my grandmother would look at her watch. It was time to pick up Grandpa, in front of his club, where he always played a rubber of bridge after leaving the office. At five o’clock, punctually, he would be on the sidewalk, anxiously surveying the traffic for us. The car would draw up; he would climb in and kiss my grandmother’s cheek. “Have a good day?” he would ask. “All right,” she would reply, sighing a little. We would get home at five-thirty; dinner was at six, punctually. During the meal, my young uncle would be queried as to how he had passed his day, and he would answer with a few monosyllables. My grandmother would mention the names of any persons she had seen on her shopping tour. My grandfather might praise the food. “Allee samee Victor Hugo,” he would say, referring to a restaurant in Los Angeles. After dinner, my married uncle would drop in with his wife, perhaps on their way out to a party. My other uncle, yawning, would retire to his quarters. The doorbell might ring. I would run to answer it, and two or three of his friends would tramp past me upstairs to his rooms. The door on the landing would shut. In a little while, he would lope down the stairs, to say that he was going out. He would kiss his mother and father, and my grandfather would say to him, “Home by eleven, son.” My grandfather and grandmother, having finished the evening papers, would start playing double Canfield, at which my grandmother nearly always won. “I’ll have to hitch up my trousers with a safety pin,” my grandfather would say to me, jesting, as he paid her over her winnings; this expression signified to him the depths of poverty.

Then he might go downtown to his club for a game of poker, or he might stay in his deep chair, smoking a cigar and reading a book that always seemed to be the same book:
The Life and Letters of Walter Hines Page.
My grandmother would take up her library book, I would take up mine, and silence would resume its way over the household. The only sound would be the turning of a page or the click of the door on the kitchen landing as the cook went upstairs to bed. Rarely, the telephone would ring, and I would rush to get it, but it was never anything interesting—someone for my uncle or a girl for me, asking what I was doing. Or my grandmother would glance over at me as I lay stretched out on the sofa with my copy (disappointing) of
Mademoiselle de Maupin:
“Mary, pull your dress down.” At ten o’clock, she would close her book, sighing, and start out to the front hall, on her way to bed. “Going up, Mama?” my grandfather would say, if he were at home, raising his gray eyes with an invariable air of surprise. “I think so, Harry,” she would reply, sighing again, from the stairs. The stairs creaked; her door closed; the bathroom door closed. Soon my grandfather would put down his book and his paper knife, offer his cheek to me for a kiss, and follow her up the stairs. The nursery door would shut.

Occasionally, we would all go to the movies, or to the theater if a New York company was in town; my grandfather did not care for stock. We saw
The Student Prince
and
No! No! Nanette!
I remember, and
Strange Interlude,
which my grandmother pronounced “talky.” On Thursday nights, we might go out to dinner at my grandfather’s club. On Sundays, the cook left a supper prepared for us; my married uncle and his wife always came to this meal, no matter how many invitations they had to turn down, and sometimes Aunt Eva or Aunt Alice. These suppers usually ended with our going to the movies afterward; we were always home by eleven.

About once a year, or possibly every two years, my grandmother gave a tea and we had the caterer in. That was the only entertaining we did. Except for Aunt Alice and Aunt Eva (both widows), we never gave anyone dinner outside the immediate family. We never had Uncle Mose and Aunt Rosie or Uncle Clarence and Aunt Abbie (a vegetarian pair) or any of my cousins and their wives or my grandfather’s partners and theirs. My grandmother’s brother Elkan, whom she saw rarely but was not on bad terms with, was never, to my knowledge, in our house, nor were his wife and his numerous progeny. This leads me to wonder whether it was not the Jewish connection that had put the bar on entertaining. “If we have one in the house, we’ll have them all,” my grandfather may have said. But we did have Aunt Eva, frequently, and once, a great exception, her daughter from Portland to Sunday lunch. The only other exception that comes back to me was a dinner we gave for old Judge Gilman, of the Great Northern, and his wife, a stout lady who called herself Little Eva; I remember this because the men were served whisky before dinner, the only time this ever happened in our house. But why we had Judge and Mrs. Gilman I do not know; I think it puzzled me at the time by introducing into my head the question of why we did not have other people, since, on this occasion, a good time was had by all.

Up to then, it had never occurred to me that my family was remarkably inhospitable. I did not realize how strange it was that no social life was ever planned for me or my young uncle, that no young people were invited for us and no attempt made to secure invitations on our behalf. Indeed, I did not fully realize it until I was over thirty and long a mother myself. If I did not have an ordinary social set but only stray, odd friends, I blamed this on myself, thinking there was something wrong with me, like a petticoat showing, that other people could see and I couldn’t. The notion that a family had responsibility for launching the younger members was more unknown to me than the theorem of Pythagoras, and if anybody had told me of it, I think I would have shut my ears, for I loved my family and did not wish to believe them remiss in any of their obligations. The fact that they would not let me go out with boys was an entirely different case; I saw their side of it, even though I disagreed violently—they were doing it for my own good, as they conceived it.

And yet I knew there was something odd about my grandmother’s attitude toward outsiders. She would never go up to Lake Crescent, in the Olympic Mountains, with my grandfather and my young uncle and me in the summertime, where, amid my grandfather’s circle of friends and their descendants, we had the only regular social life I ever experienced in the West. Life in the mountain hotel was very gay, even for the old people—Judge and Mrs. Battle, Colonel Blethen, Mr. Edgar Battle, Mr. Claude Ramsay, Mr. and Mrs. Boole—in my grandfather’s set. They had card games on the big veranda and forest walks up to the Marymere waterfall; they took motorboat expeditions and automobile expeditions; they watched the young people dance in the evening and sent big tips to the chef in the kitchen. I could not understand why my grandmother preferred to stay in Seattle, pursuing her inflexible routine.

She was funny that way—that was the only explanation—just as she was funny about not letting my young uncle or me ever have a friend stay to dinner. In all the years I lived with my grandmother, as a child and a woman, I can only recall two occasions when this rule was ever broken. The second one was when she was bedridden and too feeble, morally, to override my determination to ask a poet who was teaching at the university to stay and have supper with me. I felt a little compunction, though the nurse and the cook assured me that it would be all right—she would forget about it the next minute. But her pretty voice, querulous, was heard from upstairs at about eight-thirty in the evening: “Mary, has that man gone home yet?” And all through the rest of my visit, she kept reverting crossly to the subject of “that man” who had stayed to supper; it was no good explaining to her that he had no means of getting home, that he lived in rooms way out at the University and took his meals in diners and tearooms, that he was an old friend to whom some hospitality was owing in my native city. Nor could I laugh her out of it. “Why didn’t he go home for his dinner?” she reiterated, and those dark, suspicious words were very nearly the last I heard from her.

This ungraciousness of my grandmother’s was a deeply confirmed trait. It was not only that she resisted offering meals to anyone outside the immediate family; she resented a mere caller. There was a silver tray for calling cards on the hall table, but most of the cards in it were yellow with age; my grandmother was always downtown shopping at the hour when calls were normally paid. If I had a girl in for the evening, we could not really talk until my grandmother had gone to bed, and often she would outstay the guest, sitting in a corner with her book and glancing at us from time to time as we sat on the sofa endeavoring to improvise a dialogue. We could tell she was listening, but she did not talk herself. Suddenly, looking up, she would make the gesture to me that meant “Pull your skirt down.”

My uncle’s situation was the same, but he had the advantage of having his own sitting room, where his friends could congregate. For the most part, my grandmother ignored their presence; she would nod to them curtly if she chanced to meet them in the hall. The girls he knew were never asked to the house; he could never give a party.

Yet she was not an unkindly woman. She was good to her servants and their families, and on some occasions, if she were persuaded to unbend and tell an anecdote, she could be positively cordial. Her house, with its big rooms and wide porches, had been built, it would seem, with a hospitable
intention.
And in my mother’s day, so I was told, things had been very different; the house had been full of young people. The silver and crystal and cut glass had not always been put away in the cupboard; there had been music and dancing, and my mother’s school and college friends had spent night after night on the sleeping porches (which served as guest rooms) without even the necessity of a permission.

My mother had been my grandmother’s darling. The fact that we did not entertain, I was given to understand, was related to my mother’s death. My grandmother had resented her marriage to my father; according to my Irish relations, she would not have a priest in the house, and so the ceremony had been performed on the lawn. I do not believe this story, which is contradicted by other accounts, but it is true that my grandmother resented the Catholic Church, to which my mother was eventually converted. Dr. Sharpies, the family physician, had told my father, it seems, that my mother would die if she had another child, and my father went right ahead anyway, refusing to practice birth control. Actually, my mother’s death had nothing to do with childbearing; she died of the flu, like so many young women of her age during the great epidemic. But this would not have deterred a woman like my grandmother from holding my father and the Church responsible. That was perhaps the reason she took no interest in my three brothers, who were still living with my father’s people in Minneapolis; she sent them checks and gifts at birthdays and Christmas, and remembered them later in her will, but during the years I lived with her, the three little boys who had been born against her judgment were very remote from her thoughts. Possibly, I was enough of a handful for a woman of her age; nevertheless, it seems odd, unfeeling, that dry lack of concern, when she well knew that their lot was not happy. But happiness, like love, was a concept she had no real patience with.

As for the impassibility or aloofness she showed sometimes toward me, this may have been due to an absence of temperamental sympathy (could she have thought I had my father’s traits?), or it may have been because I reminded her painfully of my mother. (I was always conscious of a resemblance that did not go far enough; everyone was always telling me how “good” my mother had been.)

For three years after my mother’s death, one of her friends told me, my grandmother did not go out socially. Five years, said another. And this prolonged mourning was always offered as the official explanation of any oddities in our household. My grandmother, people said, lowering their voices, had never recovered from the shock of my mother’s death. As a child, I could not quite believe this; it was impossible for me to imagine this contained, self-centered woman overcome by a passion of grief. Without being a psychologist, I felt somehow that her obdurate mourning was willful and selfish.