Mary McCarthy

by Thomas Mallon

  With a conscious sense of drama, she walked over to the bookshelves and took down The Queen’s Necklace. Dumas had been forbidden her because he was on the Index. “Can I have this now?” she asked. Her father glanced up at the long line of novels in the worn, burgundy-colored bindings. “I ate those up when I was a boy.” She smiled and turned to go. “You can read it in here,” he said. “No need to rub it in. Your aunt is going to be pretty upset. You must go easy on her.” Her face fell. “You must learn to be a good sport, Meg,” he said gently. “It’s a poor winner that gloats.”

  Would she have had the courage, she wondered, to have taken up that extreme position if she had not known, unconsciously, that deep down in his soul her father was cheering her on? She was not sure. “You must stop belittling yourself,” said Dr. James. “It doesn’t make any difference what you would have done under some different circumstances. The fact is that you did the best you could with the circumstances you had. Anybody on the outside would say you acted very bravely.” Ah yes, she thought, but again you miss the point. It had not been a real test. That was what she feared and desired, the real test, the ordeal, the burning tenement house with the baby asleep on the fifth floor (would you rush in and save it if there were absolutely no one looking, no God in heaven to welcome your charred but purified spirit, no newspaper account the next day, YOUNG WOMAN DIES SAVING SLUM CHILD; if there were nothing in the world but you and the baby and the fire, would you not say to yourself that it was undoubtedly too late, that the baby must already have suffocated, that the fire was not serious, that the baby was not there at all but in the house across the street?). And of course, as Dr. James said, life is not like that. In life there is always the mitigating circumstance: “Conditions were not right yesterday for the experiment that was to have been performed,” “Findings of observers are open to serious question because of the cloudiness of the atmosphere.” Yet actually all this is misleading; the details, the environmental factors, the conflicting accounts of witnesses serve merely to obscure the fact that the question has been put, is being put, will be put, but worded so ambiguously, tucked into such an innocent context, that the subject cannot learn whether or not he has taken the test, let alone what his mark is. It therefore becomes important—for the subject who is interested in his status (there are many who simply don’t care and doubtless they are the ones who graduate summa cum laude)—to examine the data of his life with the utmost severity and cunning, turning the facts every which way, sidewards, upside down, as one turned those old newspaper puzzles to find the face in the cloud.

  In her own case, appearances were certainly against her. (Don’t look now but isn’t she the girl who stirred up all that trouble a few years ago? Treated her husband so badly he drove his car off that cliff. Of course, he was drunk and luckily he wasn’t hurt, but still . . . And then that other guy—what was his name—she worked on him till he left his wife and then wouldn’t have anything to do with him. And there was another story . . . he was sick and she didn’t go to see him . . . The time she made poor so-and-so quit his job on that foundation because it wasn’t radical enough to suit her . . . Got them to introduce her to some publishers and then dropped them like a hot-cake . . . Her best friend . . . Now she’s married to that architect, you know the one, that does those houses with ramps . . . I guess she’s got what she wants, but they fight like cats and dogs . . .) A shady case, unquestionably, a sordid history of betrayal. Yet, in some way, she was not like that. She would look at her face in the mirror and recognize in her features something direct, candid, sincere, some inward innocence engraved there that made strangers trust her on sight, tell her their troubles, ask her to watch their babies, help her carry her parcels. Policemen and taxi drivers smiled at her, truck drivers laughed at her hats. There it was, the unreasonable vote of confidence, which was not quite unearned. She would be, she felt, half entitled to it so long as she refused to become reconciled with herself, so long as the right hand remained on guard, the angry watchdog of the left. Yet in Dr. James’ eyes all this was sheer folly.

  “Accept yourself as you are,” he said. “Stop trying to dig in to your motives. You have set yourself a moral standard that nobody could live up to. Your early religious training . . .” Ah dear, she thought, how they all deplore my early religious training. “For God’s sake,” her husband said, “give up worrying about your imaginary sins and try to behave decently. You use your wonderful scruples as an excuse for acting like a bitch. Instead of telling yourself that you oughtn’t to have married me, you might concentrate on being a good wife.” “But I do try,” she said sadly. “I really do.” “Oh, Jesus,” he said, “you overdo it or you underdo it. One day you’re a miracle of a woman and the next morning you’re a hell-cat. Why do we have to live like that? Why can’t you be like anybody else?”

  That was what he had sent her to the doctor for—a perfectly simple little operation. First comes the anesthetic, the sweet, optimistic laughing-gas of science (you are not bad, you are merely unhappy, the bathtub murderer is “sick,” the Dead End Kid is a problem child, poor Hitler is a paranoiac, and that dirty fornication in a hotel room, why, that, dear Miss Sargent, is a “relationship”). After consciousness has been put to sleep, it is a very easy matter (just look the other way, please; it isn’t going to hurt, but the sight of the instruments seems to disturb excitable people like yourself), it is a very easy matter to cut out the festering conscience, which was of no use to you at all, and was only making you suffer. Then the patient takes a short rest and emerges as a cured neurotic; the personality has vanished, but otherwise he is perfectly normal; he never drinks too much or beats his wife or sleeps with the wrong person. He has returned to the Garden of Eden, the apple is back on the tree, the snake is a sportive phallus. If there is something a little bewildered, a little pathetic about this revenant, it is only that the ancestral paradise is, like all the homes of our childhood, smaller than he remembered.

  Already, in her own case, the effects of treatment were noticeable. “You have lost those unnatural high spirits,” her friends told her. “You are not so tense as you used to be. You don’t get so excited about causes.” It was true, she was more subdued; she did not assert herself in company; she let her husband talk on his own subjects, in his own vein; she told white lies, where before she had only told black ones. She learned to suppress the unpleasant, unnecessary truths: why let an author know that you do not like his book, why spoil a party by getting into an argument, why not tell your friend that her ugly house is pretty? And why mention to your husband that you have spent too much money on an evening dress, gone to the races and lost, had too much to drink, let a man kiss you in the pantry? Pay your debt with the housekeeping money, take your mother’s bracelet to the pawnshop, stifle the hangover with benzedrine, say the ice tray stuck and you were a long time getting it out. Do, in other words, what every normal wife does, agree and go your own way (it would only upset him if he knew; it is not important anyway; he would think I was silly to mention it). And if you want the last chop on the plate, the last drink in the bottle, take it, do not force it on him merely because you want it so much—that would simply be making a nuisance of yourself. Stop trying to be fair; only a child insists that everything should be divided equally. Grab whatever you need; he will do the same to you.

  What Frederick had not foreseen was that the good would vanish with the bad, that a man may easily overreach himself in making provisions for his comfort. His situation was like that of a woman who gets a hat altered to suit her features. It is only a small adjustment, the crown is lowered or heightened, the rakish feather is removed; there is no longer any fault to be found, but the customer looks in the mirror and weeps for her folly, because the hat is no longer stylish. Moreover, it is not returnable; it must lie in the closet for a certain number of seasons, till it is old enough to be given to a charity. And she herself was not returnable either. She could no longer go back into circulation, as she had done so often bef
ore. The little apartment in the Village, the cocktail parties, the search for a job, the loneliness, the harum-scarum, Bohemian habits, all this was now unthinkable for her. She had lost the life-giving illusion, the sense of the clean slate, the I-will-start-all-over-and-this-time-it-is-going-to-be-different. Up to the day that Frederick had sent her to the doctor, she had believed herself indestructible. Now she regarded herself as a brittle piece of porcelain. Between the two of them, they had taught her the fine art of self-pity. “Take it easy,” “Don’t try to do too much,” “You are only human, you know,” “Have a drink or an aspirin, lie down, you are overstrained.” In other words, you are a poor, unfortunate girl who was badly treated in her childhood, and the world owes you something. And there is the corollary: you must not venture outside this comfortable hospital room we have arranged for you, see how homey it is, the striped curtains, the gay bedspread, the easy chair with the reading lamp, why, you would hardly know it was a hospital—BUT (the threat lay in the conjunction), don’t try to get up, you are not strong enough; if you managed to evade the floor nurses, you would be sure to collapse in the street.

  Certainly, Frederick could not have intended this. He had sent her to Dr. James because he was unimaginative, because he believed in science in the same way that as an architect he believed in model tenement houses, and slum-clearance projects, and the Garden City of the Future, which would have straight streets, and lots of fresh air, and parks of culture and rest. When she had wept and cursed and kicked at him, he had not known how to “cope with” her (the phrase was his), and out of timidity, out of a certain sluggishness, an unwillingness to be disturbed, to take too much spiritual trouble, he had done what the modern, liberal man inevitably does—called in an expert. How characteristic of him, she thought, smiling, this great builder of cities, who cannot fix a leaky faucet! Poor Frederick, she murmured to herself, he did not see it in the cards at all that his spirited termagant of a wife would be converted into a whimpering invalid who no longer raged at him so often, who no longer wept every morning and seldom threatened to kill him, but who complained, stood on her prerogatives, and was chronically, vocally tired. And yet . . . Perhaps he had seen it, and accepted it as a lesser evil to living with her on terms of equality or allowing her to leave him. He was always talking about what he called her “bad record,” a divorce, three broken engagements, a whole series of love affairs abandoned in medias res. Perhaps what counted for him more than anything else, more than love (did he love her, did he know what love was all about?), more than a stable household with a pretty wife across the dinner table, was that this should not happen to him, that no one should be able to say, “Well, she’s done it again.” Furthermore, the fact of her illness, a fact she could not talk away, since she went to the doctor daily, this fact was invaluable to him as a weapon in their disputes. He was always in a position to say to her, “You are excited, you don’t know what you are saying,” “You are not a fit judge of this because you are neurotic,” “We won’t discuss this further, you are not sane on the subject,” and “I don’t want you to see your old friends because they play into your morbid tendencies.” And under the pressure of this, her own sense of truth was weakening. This and her wonderful scruples were all she had in the world, and both were slipping away from her. Overcome by the pathos of her situation, she began to cry.

  Dr. James, who was still talking about castration, stopped in the middle of a sentence.

  “What is it?” he said. “What upset you?” He had his notebook ready.

  “I wasn’t listening,” she said, knowing that this was not quite accurate. She had heard him, but the mind’s time is quicker than the tongue’s. Through the interstices of one of his measured paragraphs her whole life could flood in. “Everything you tell me may be true, but it’s irrelevant. Supposing at a certain time in my life, a time I can’t remember, I found out that girls were different from boys. No doubt this was a very poignant moment, but I can’t go back to it. My horrors are in the present.”

  “But you have never learned to accept that difference.”

  “Ah,” she said, “now you are on Frederick’s side. You think I ought to welcome my womanly role in life, keep up his position, defer to him, tell him how wonderful he is, pick up the crumbs from his table and eat them in the kitchen.”

  “No,” he said, “no. You have a lot to contend with. The marriage is not ideal. It’s unfortunate, for one thing, that you should have chosen to marry exactly the kind of man who would make you feel most enslaved and helpless.”

  “Feel!” she replied indignantly.

  “Well,” he said in his most reasonable and optimistic manner, “you could always get away from him. I think you want to stay with him. I think you are fond of him and that the two of you have the possibility of a solid relationship. Mutual interests . . . you could have children . . . you can’t keep on the way you were going, flying from one hectic love affair to another.”

  “No,” she said ruefully, “you can’t.”

  If one only could . . . But it required strength. It took it out of one so. The romantic life had been too hard for her. In morals as in politics anarchy is not for the weak. The small state, racked by internal dissension, invites the foreign conqueror. Proscription, martial law, the billeting of the rude troops, the tax collector, the unjust judge, anything, anything at all, is sweeter than responsibility. The dictator is also the scapegoat; in assuming absolute authority, he assumes absolute guilt; and the oppressed masses, groaning under the yoke, know themselves to be innocent as lambs, while they pray hypocritically for deliverance. Frederick imagined that she had married him for security (this was one of the troubles between them), but what he did not understand was that security from the telephone company or the grocer was as nothing compared to the other security he gave her, the security from being perpetually in the wrong, and that she would have eaten bread and water, if necessary, in order to be kept in jail.

  To know God and yet do evil, this was the very essence of the romantic life, a kind of electrolytical process in which the cathode and the anode act and react upon each other to ionize the soul. And, as they said, it could not go on. If you cannot stop doing evil, you must try to forget about God. If your eyes are bigger than your stomach, by all means put one of them out. Learn to measure your capacities, never undertake more than you can do, then no one will know that you are a failure, you will not even know it yourself. If you cannot love, stop attempting it, for in each attempt you will only reveal your poverty, and every bed you have ever slept in will commemorate a battle lost. The betrayer is always the debtor; at best, he can only work out in remorse his deficit of love, until remorse itself becomes love’s humble, shamefaced proxy. The two she had cared for most (or was it that they had cared most for her?) had, she believed, understood all this during those last hours when the packed trunks stood about the room and the last pound of butter got soft in the defrosting icebox (it seemed a pity to waste it, but what were you going to do?). They had consoled her and petted her and promised that she would be happy, that she would soon forget them—just as if they had been leaving her, instead of the other way around. The most curious thing about it was that their wounds, whose seriousness perhaps she had exaggerated, had been readily healed by time, while her own, being self-inflicted, continued to pain her. There are other girls in the world, but there is only the single self.

  She remembered Frederick’s impatience when she had tried to explain this to him. “You couldn’t have cared much for him or you wouldn’t have wanted to leave him,” he had said in a grumpy voice. “Really, Frederick,” she had answered, “can’t you possibly understand . . . ?” “By their fruits ye shall know them,” he replied, sententiously. This was one of his favorite quotations, a quotation which, of course, damned her utterly. Yet, she said to herself now, be fair. This is precisely what you want, to be condemned but condemned unjustly, on circumstantial evidence, so that you can feel that there is still some hope for you, th
at the very illegality of the proceedings against you will advance your cause in some higher court. The prisoner has been under duress; she has been treated with great harshness; let me show you, your honor, the marks of the cat-o’-nine-tails. It was for his incomprehension, his blunt severity, his egoism, that she had married Frederick in the first place. She had known from the very beginning that he would never really love her, and this was what had counted for her, far more than the security or the social position. Or rather perhaps she had felt that she was free to accept these things because the gift of love was lacking. When that man on the train had offered them to her she had had to refuse because love had been offered with them. And yet, she thought, she was being unfair again, for she would never under any conditions have married the man on the train, while there had been something about Frederick (the so-called mutual interests, a certain genuine solidity of character of which the mulishness was only one aspect) that had made her marry him and even believe for a short while that surely it would turn out well, that this time she would be happy and good, that a strong, successful architect was exactly what the recipe called for. An architect, she said to herself scornfully, the perfect compromise candidate, something halfway between a businessman and an artist.