Cruel and Barbarous Treatment

Abstract

Cruel and Barbarous Treatment Robert Lacy (bio) Blaisdell Avenue in Minneapolis is one-way these days, with heavy traffic moving north to south. Where a “boxy, jaundice-colored” house once sat, now squats a nondescript apartment building instead. Anyone driving past will likely not realize that the site bears historical significance, but it does. It was here, at 2427 Blaisdell, many decades ago, that a little girl and her three younger brothers were held against their will and routinely mistreated for five long years. The girl was Mary McCarthy, who would go on to become one of the leading literary figures—as critic, essayist, short-story writer, novelist, and political journalist—of her generation. Whether she would do so despite or because of what happened to her in the yellow house on Blaisdell may be open to question. How it happened, though, and why, is not and makes for a strange, sad story. It begins with the great Spanish flu epidemic of 1918, which, before it had run its course, would claim more than fifty million lives, including those of Mary’s parents, Roy and Tess McCarthy. Roy was the son of J. H. McCarthy, a wealthy Minneapolis grain dealer. He was big and good looking but something of a ne’er-do-well, and he had a bad heart. Tess was the daughter of a prominent Seattle lawyer and was said by many to be the best-looking girl in that city. Roy had been dispatched by his father to the West Coast to work for a timber broker, but that hadn’t panned out, and he’d enrolled in law school in Seattle at age thirty-five instead. That’s where he met, and soon married, Tess. Roy began practicing law in Seattle, but apparently that didn’t go well either; he and his growing family were still being supported by his parents back in Minnesota. Eventually Roy’s dependence became onerous to the elder McCarthys, and they summoned the younger couple home to Minneapolis, where a house, the one on Blaisdell Avenue, was being purchased for them. They were en route to Minneapolis by train with their four small children—Mary, at age six, being the oldest—when the flu struck. Both Roy and Tess were taken off the Pullman car at the Minneapolis station on stretchers. Within the week they were dead. This left Mary and the three little boys—Kevin, Preston, and Sheridan—orphaned and in the hands of their McCarthy grandparents, who rather quickly farmed them out to a middle-aged couple named Myers and Margaret Shriver. Margaret was the sister of their McCarthy grandmother and [End Page 325] had married, late in life the younger Myers, who would quickly become the villain in the piece. An overweight, sandy-haired, former “pickle buyer” from Elkhart, Indiana, Myers was cruel and self-centered to an almost Dickensian degree. He sat enthroned in the Blaisdell house and daily mistreated the children, especially Mary, to whom he seemed to take a special dislike in any number of ways. When she was ten and in school, Mary won a citywide essay contest for which she received a cash prize of twenty-five dollars, as she recounts in her memoir “A Tin Butterfly,” part of her Memories of a Catholic Girlhood. When she got home, she tells us, “my uncle [Myers] silently rose from his chair, led me into the dark downstairs lavatory, which always smelled of shaving cream, and furiously beat me with the razor strop—to teach me a lesson, he said, lest I become stuck up.” According to Mary, such thrashings were routine. “We were beaten all the time, as a matter of course,” she says, “with the hairbrush across the bare legs for ordinary occasions, and with the razor strop across the bare bottom for special occasions, like the prize-winning.” “A Tin Butterfly” is probably the best known of McCarthy’s serial indictments of her “uncle” Myers Shriver. It first appeared in the New Yorker in 1951. In it she recounts the spartan diet the children were subjected to: “We had prunes every day for breakfast, and cornmeal mush, Wheatena or farina, which I...