Peter’s head was aching. She touched his forehead. “You still have a little temperature. You’d better not talk any more. I’ll sit here and read.” “Have you been here before, Mother?” “Yesterday. I came from the airport. You were delirious then.” “Am I really going to be all right, Mother? Tell me the truth.” “Absolutely, Peter. By tomorrow, your fever should be gone. But you’ll be weak for a few days. On top of everything else, you fainted in the bathroom, from the penicillin, and may have had a slight concussion.” He lay back. “Oh, God!” he cried, remembering. “Are we still bombing those Vietnamese?” She nodded. Tears of rage rolled out of his eyes. “I hate us.” “They claim it’s only military targets.” “Do you believe that?” “No.” “Have we hit Hanoi?” She shook her head. “So until that happens,” said Peter, “we can feel it’s all OK, eh, Ma? They get us used to it by slowly increasing the dose. So we build up a tolerance.”
She smoothed his pillow and persuaded him to lie down. In a minute, he started up again. Everything was coming back. “Is the State Department sending you to Poland?” He could see from her face that it was. “You’ll have to cancel.” “Oh, Peter, you exaggerate. It’s just music. Music isn’t political.” “You know better than that, Rosamund.” “But I can’t, at the last minute. If I’d known before … A performer can’t do that.” “You have to, Mother. Believe me.”
For a while, they did not talk. He actually dozed. Then a maid brought in his supper tray and cranked him up. “It’s your first meal,” his mother said, smiling. “But I hear you had quite a lot of company. Finally they put a ‘No Visitors’ sign on your door.” “Who was here?” “The Scott girl. She’s delightful, Peter. And the Platt boy, of course. What a strange creature! I used to know his father, in New York, before I was married. In fact he was one of my suitors.”
Peter was too weary to reflect on the dynastic implications of this. If his mother had married Silly’s father, who would he be? He saw that the fair Rosamund was hoping to divert him from the ukase he had issued and he did not mind being diverted, because he knew that in the end she would yield. She needed a little time for the point to sink in. What shook him was that it should have taken her nineteen-year-old son to make plain to her that there were things she could not do. And how had Bob let her get this far on the State Department tab? Peter pitied them both and his mother especially. She had no authority for him any more.
“Who else was here? Come on, keep the ball rolling, Mother.” “I think your adviser came.” “Did they let him in? God, I hope not.” His mother was not sure. “Some just left their names. You seem to have made an extraordinary number of friends. You’ve been holding a regular levee here. Your concierge is very concerned about you, by the way. She sent you a Get Well card. Here it is.” Peter looked at the card. “Oh? You went to my apartment?” “I’m staying there. I hope you don’t mind.” Actually Peter was glad. He could count on her anyway to water the plants. “It’s strange, your doorknob was stolen. How do you account for that, Peter? And the Platt boy didn’t lock up when you left. The concierge thinks a derelict must have been sleeping in your room.”
Peter gulped. He wondered what his mother would do if the clocharde returned while she was there. The thought afforded him some disconsolate amusement. It would be interesting to see her tested. But that was unfair, since he would have left her the problem as a legacy. Moreover, to do her justice, she was the only adult he would trust to understand the story of that night. But today was not the moment. Instead, he decided to tell her about the visit of la Delfica. “How marvelous! What a nice delirium!” She looked rather proud, as though her son had made a three-star acquaintance. “I think you must have had several imaginary visitors. All your helpers and hinderers. Yesterday you were talking very volubly.” “I had a few.” “Who were the others? Tell me.” Peter shook his head. “Oh, please, Peter!” “No.”
He had remembered. A shivery sadness crept through him; he pulled the sheet over his head. He did not want to talk any more. “Please go away, Mother, for a little while. Call up and cancel your ticket. I want to think.”
The visitor had been sitting quietly at the foot of his bed, waiting for Peter to wake up—a small man, scarcely five feet high, in an unbuttoned twill jacket with a white stock. It looked as if he had been there quite a while. His hair was curled in sausages and powdered—or was it a periwig?—and fastened behind with a gray bow. He was in the prime of life; around his bright vivacious eyes were crow’s-feet, which showed intensive thought. Peter knew him at once, and he evidently had known Peter for a long time, though this was their first meeting. Breaking with his lifelong habit, he had come all the way from Königsberg because Peter was sick. He was making a double exception, since, Peter recalled, he always shunned sickrooms.
“When you were young, you wrote an ode to the West Wind,” Peter said, to show how lovingly he had collected every fact about him. “Theory of Winds,” the little man emended. “Of course. How stupid! I’m sorry. The way I feel, my brain gets things a bit confused. Actually, I’ve never read it.” “It doesn’t matter,” said Kant. “And you were for the French Revolution,” prompted Peter. But that was not what his mentor had come to talk about. “I was thinking of you yesterday,” Peter went on, not letting the visitor speak in his excitement at having him here. “I guess it was yesterday. In the Jardin des Plantes. Something our professor said you said about the beautiful things in the world proving that man is made for and fits into the world and that his perception of things agrees with the laws of his perception. It sounded better when he read it in German.” “ ‘Die schönen Dinge zeigen an …’ Ach, ja!” Kant bowed his head and sighed.
“Excuse me, sir, you have something to tell me, don’t you?” The tiny man moved forward on the counterpane and looked Peter keenly in the eyes, as though anxious as to how he would receive the message he had to deliver. He spoke in a low thin voice. “God is dead,” Peter understood him to say. Peter sat up. “I know that,” he protested. “And you didn’t say that anyway. Nietzsche did.” He felt put upon, as though by an impostor. Kant smiled. “Yes, Nietzsche said that. And even when Nietzsche said it, the news was not new, and maybe not so tragic after all. Mankind can live without God.” “I agree,” said Peter. “I’ve always lived without Him.” “No, what I say to you is something important. You did not hear me correctly. Listen now carefully and remember.” Again he looked Peter steadily and searchingly in the eyes. “Perhaps you have guessed it. Nature is dead, mein kind.”
A Biography of Mary McCarthy
Mary McCarthy (1912–1989) was an American critic, public intellectual, and author of more than two dozen books, including the 1963 New York Times bestseller The Group.
McCarthy was born on June 21, 1912, in Seattle, Washington, to Roy Winfield McCarthy and Therese (“Tess”) Preston McCarthy. McCarthy and her three younger brothers, Kevin, Preston, and Sheridan, were suddenly orphaned in 1918. While the family was en route from Seattle to a new home in Minneapolis, both parents died of influenza within a day of one another.
After being shuttled between relatives, the children were finally sent to live with a great-aunt, Margaret Sheridan McCarthy, and her husband, Myers Shriver. The Shrivers proved to be cruel and often sadistic adoptive parents. Six years later, Harold Preston, the children’s maternal grandfather and an attorney, intervened. The children were split up, and Mary went to live with her grandparents in their affluent Seattle home. McCarthy reflects on her turbulent youth, Catholic upbringing, and subsequent loss of faith in Memories of a Catholic Girlhood (1957) and How I Grew (1987).
A week after graduating from Vassar in 1933, McCarthy moved to New York City and married Harold Johnsrud, an aspiring playwright. They divorced three years later, but many aspects of their relationship would resurface in the unhappy marriage of Kay Strong and Harald Petersen in The Group. In the late 1930s, McCarthy became a member of the Partisan Review circle and worked actively as a theater and book critic, contributing to
a wide range of publications, such as the Nation, the New Republic, Harper’s Magazine, and the New York Review of Books.
In 1938, McCarthy married Edmund Wilson, an established writer; together, they had a son named Reuel, born the same year. Wilson encouraged McCarthy to write fiction, and her first book, a novel entitled The Company She Keeps (1942), satirizes the mores of bohemian New York intellectuals from the point of view of an acerbic female protagonist. Her second book, The Oasis, a thinly disguised roman à clef about the Partisan Review intellectuals, won the English monthly magazine Horizon’s fiction contest in 1949.
Soon after her divorce from Wilson in 1945, McCarthy married Bowden Broadwater, a staff member of the New Yorker, and also taught literature at Bard College and Sarah Lawrence College. A Charmed Life (1955), a novel about the rollercoaster experience of a shaky marriage in a quirky artists’ community, is based on her life with Wilson in Wellfleet, Cape Cod. The Groves of Academe (1951), a campus satire informed by her teaching positions, casts an ironic gaze on the foibles of academics. Randall Jarrell’s novel Pictures from an Institution (1954) is said to be about McCarthy’s time at Sarah Lawrence, where he also taught.
In the 1950s, McCarthy took a strong interest in European history. Her two books about Italy, Venice Observed (1956) and The Stones of Florence (1959), combine art criticism, political theory, and reportage to bring the two cities’ histories to life. While on a lecture tour in Poland for the United States Information Agency in 1959 and 1960, McCarthy met the public affairs officer for the US Embassy in Warsaw, James West. McCarthy and West left their respective partners and were married in 1961.
McCarthy’s most popular literary success came in 1963 with the publication of her novel The Group, which remained on the New York Times bestseller list for almost two years, and was made into a movie by Sidney Lumet in 1966.
McCarthy remained an outspoken critic of politics in the decades that followed. Openly opposing the Vietnam War in the 1960s, she traveled to South Vietnam and wrote a series of articles for the New York Review of Books that were subsequently published as Vietnam (1967). Her coverage of the Watergate hearings in the 1970s is the basis for The Mask of State (1975). Her famous libel feud with writer Lillian Hellman, stemming from McCarthy’s appearance on the Dick Cavett Show in 1979, formed the basis for the play Imaginary Friends (2002) by Nora Ephron.
McCarthy won a number of literary awards, including the Horizon magazine prize (1949) and two Guggenheim Fellowships (1949–1950 and 1959–1960). She also received both the Edward MacDowell Medal and the National Medal for Literature in 1984. She was a member of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, the National Institute of Arts and Letters, and the American Academy in Rome. She received honorary degrees from numerous universities including Bard College, Smith College, and Syracuse University.
McCarthy passed away on October 25, 1989. The second volume of her autobiography was published posthumously in 1992 as Intellectual Memoirs: New York, 1936–1938.
A portrait of McCarthy, taken in 1959.
McCarthy with her brother Kevin, circa 1985.
McCarthy with her young son, Reuel Wilson, in 1940.
McCarthy at the wedding of her son, Reuel, in 1981.
McCarthy, circa 1929, on the cover of her autobiography How I Grew.
A flyer for a conference held in 1983 on McCarthy’s work.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1965, 1970, 1971 by Mary McCarthy
Cover design by Tracey Dunham
978-1-4804-3826-2
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