Mary McCarthy

by Thomas Mallon

  Nor, prompted memory, a precisian, was that all. Had not Hoar—yes, on that identical occasion—gone on to lay down the principle that the president of a college dedicated to free teaching methods had a duty, in times such as these, not to engage irresponsibly in political activities that could imperil the whole academic structure and in which (school principal’s keen, probing gaze; measured pause for emphasis) he had no deep belief. Seeing how everything fitted together (whom else could this homily have been meant for?), Mulcahy fetched a sigh. The picture of the liberal educator in action was more damning than even he had supposed. It was a case, plainly, for the A.A.U.P. Grievance Committee, a clear instance of political pressure, complete with dates and witnesses. The evidence had been there all along, but he himself, in some recalcitrant part of his moral fiber, had been unwilling to see it. Preferable for humanity’s sake, he thought, frowning, to believe that a teacher was being fired because of a personal vendetta than to know that a public man like Hoar was a lie, from springing curly hair to the soles of his moccasin shoes!

  Mulcahy made a grimace of disgust, conscious suddenly of a moral distaste not only for this nasty specimen of the genus careerist impaled on the pin of discovery but for the task of exposing it to the public eye. And also, for the first time, strangely enough, he felt a certain chill objective sympathy or commiseration for a man who could sink so low, as for an inching worm on which the heel is descending. The certainty that Hoar was deliberately using him as a scapegoat to satisfy the reactionary trustees and fund-raisers afforded him no joy, but, rather, sorrow for the race of men in general and for this particular example of the human kind. And the fact that he, Henry Mulcahy, had it within his power to ruin the man forever, at least in liberal circles (make no mistake, he said to himself bitterly, factual proof is unnecessary; the charge, the mere charge, will be sufficient), inclined him to fellow-feeling. He had seen, he thought, too much of venality in the course of his academic experience to regard Jocelyn’s president as exceptional or exceptionally deserving of punishment. Not being an idealist, he was indifferent to the law of the talion; regrettably, perhaps, but indubitably, he lacked the taste for blood.

  And the threat of exposure in such cases, as one scarcely needed to remind oneself—a pinched, wintry smile sharpened his diffuse features—was generally more effective than the act. Seated at his desk, he tilted his fingertips together in a contemplative triangle, and leisuredly allowed his passion to cool—a favorite amusement of his spare moments and an intellectual tonic. Live and let live, he finally opined, was the most politic motto for the occasion. Maynard Hoar confronted with charges in a faculty meeting or before the A.A.U.P. would have no recourse but to fight, but Maynard Hoar in his office, respectfully urged to “reconsider” by a little ad-hoc committee (“Think, President Hoar, is this the best moment, in the very thick of the battle for academic liberties, to let out a dissident teacher, the father of four children? Is there not, in these times, an obligation to avoid even the appearance of yielding to popular pressures?”) was still, one would guess, open to persuasion. . . . Mulcahy sighed, forgoing the satisfaction of a joined battle; he was conscious of submitting to practicality as to an austere virtue.

  The President (it was always well to remember) had the legal power not to reappoint anyone short of the professorial rank, and though a legal power was scarcely a moral imperative, how many ardent defenders (were the case to be argued in public) of the President’s inalienable right to fire whom he pleased—for the color of his hair or his hatband—would not throng eagerly forward to speak against Mulcahy in the name of lily-white principle, and in the front ranks of the defenders of principle would he not find friends, who had dined with him, who had played with the children, who would be delighted now to lend him money, to write to a friend, the head of an adult-education project and fix him up with a splendid job, teaching nights to illiterates?

  A terse laugh broke from him, and at almost the same moment, the two timid knocks he had been expecting sounded on the door. A young girl’s face appeared, looking frightened. “Dr. Mulcahy?” “Come in, Sheila,” he instructed kindly, taking pains as usual to speak in a soft, solicitous voice. Folding her heavy coat over the back of the side chair, the girl sat down, put her books on the arm, and crossed her thin hands tensely in her lap. She was pale, round-shouldered, reticent, a freshman, the daughter of a commercial artist, whom she reverently invoked as “Daddy.” Her trial-project was American naturalism. Mulcahy’s spectacled eyes assessed her, half pitying: a typical Jocelyn student of the paying sort that had been admitted in the fall by an over-lenient registrar. The thin, blond hair, he observed with interest, was done in a new fashion, braided around her head in two petering-out pigtails—the style of the President’s wife.

  He raised his eyebrows a trifle. This visible sign of the Presidential influence affected him very unpleasantly; he took it as a bad omen for himself and his cause. At the same time, he felt quite detached and made note of it merely as a symptom, a corroboratory straw in the wind. “So that is how the land lies,” he thought, giving an inward whistle. He felt decision form in him, like a clot. While the girl watched him, rabbit-scared, he refolded the President’s letter, creased it incisively with his thumbnail, and dropped it into his file. He performed this action very slowly and deliberately, conscious that the girl would be thinking that the document he was suppressing must have something to do with her grades. “Now Sheila,” he said to her, smiling, idly prolonging her mystification, “I see you are fixing your hair differently.”

  The girl’s face brightened with a start; she glanced at the file somewhat doubtfully, as if seeking a connection. Then she looked up at him and blushed. “Do you like it?” she shyly asked. “Very much, Sheila,” he replied in a grave tone. “It reminds me of my three little girls, with their pigtails. Do you know them, Sheila?” The girl nodded several times and spoke breathlessly. “I’ve seen them with you in the Co-op, Dr. Mulcahy. They’re darling.”

  Mulcahy leaned forward, spontaneously moved. “You must come some time and see the baby boy, Sheila. You’ll like him.” “I’d love to,” breathed the girl. “I love babies.” “He’s sick this morning, though, Sheila,” he confided. “His mother is sick too.” Impulse had been propelling him, almost against his will. He felt himself gliding, by rhythmic easy stages, into the girl’s confidence; the knowledge that there, in the file, lay that which would disrupt her faith in officialdom gave him a sense of power over her and all her virgin classmates, and the fact that he had no intention of letting her in on that knowledge allowed him, he calculated, to carry her to the very verge of discovery with perfect safety to himself. Yet now a slight shifting of the girl’s weight in her chair made him imagine that he had lost his hold on her. Conscious that his delivery had become somewhat false and saccharine, he darted a mistrustful glance into her eyes; what, he thought angrily, did the young care for sickness and sorrow? Very likely, thanks to the Sitters’ Bureau, she had already had an earful of his domestic cares. Her eyes, however, were starry with sympathy and a sort of joyous gratitude; two anxious furrows had appeared between her fuzzy brows.

  “How awful, Dr. Mulcahy,” she whispered. “I know just how you must feel.”

  A smile touched his lips, a trifle coldly. “I doubt whether you do, my dear,” he retorted, stung to shortness by her innocence, her protected life, her “Daddy.” He regarded her, narrowing his eyes, feeling pity for her inexperience, her weak, soft, waxy soul, plastic to all impressions, to himself, to the Hoars. “I doubt whether you do,” he lightly repeated.

  The girl looked at him curiously, waiting for him to go on. He felt a harsh desire to initiate that innocence, to ply it with brute facts, like drink. At the same time, he was aware that he ought to titillate her no longer. Her aroused curiosity was a temptation, which, having savored it, he must now in wisdom put aside. According to academic usage, the man must disappear into the pedagogue. He chose a book from her chair-arm.

  �
�Sherwood Anderson,” he announced, reading from the spine. “And how did you like Windy MacPherson?” Yet even as he was speaking, he felt another, irresistible force take hold of him, not rudely but almost playfully, like a spring breeze. “Look, Sheila,” he murmured quickly, as if fearful of being overheard or interrupted. “Would you like me to tell you a secret?” The girl nodded, straining forward. He had consolatory visions of student petitions, torchlight parades, sit-down strikes in the classroom. He held her in suspense for a moment—like a conductor, he thought, with raised baton over the woodwinds of her feelings. “This morning, I was fired from Jocelyn.”

  CHAPTER II

  Mulcahy Has an Idea

  WHAT THE student, Sheila McKay, replied to his confidence was: how terrible, Dr. Mulcahy; how awful to have to break such a piece of news to your wife. Among the still-filial section of the student-body, the Mulcahys were acclaimed as a very devoted couple, an ideal couple, the girls said; so wrapped up in each other. They were popular, especially, as chaperons at the regular Saturday night dances, with the fat girls, pale girls, pimpled boys, chinless boys who stiffly paired off in the drafty gymnasium decorated with bows of crepe paper, while the rougher element, scornful of the old self-play phonograph or cheap three-piece band, of the basketball nets and the Indian clubs, drove off in its convertible to Gus’s roadhouse or put on its pork-pie hat and buttoned its windbreaker and hitchhiked down the state highway to York or Lancaster or up to Harrisburg or chipped in on a gallon of red wine and made love on the couches of the darkened social rooms. In the brightly lit gymnasium, however, Catherine Mulcahy, née Riordan, led off with a boy-student, her pale-rimmed spectacles folded in their case for the night, her long heavy straight brown hair wound up high with a Spanish comb from which a white-lace mantilla descended. She wore her wedding-dress, a white satin and net concoction with a short train; crystal drops sparkled at her ears; lipstick outlined her thin lips; and the pale, somewhat watery blue of her eyes, the sharp cut of her nose, which ordinarily had a secretarial quiver, were lustered and softened with excitement and a heightened sexual aplomb. “Doesn’t Mrs. Mulcahy look beautiful?” the girls cried to their escorts, identifying Catherine’s triumph over four children, housekeeping, and poverty with their own trepidant emergence from the chrysalis of slacks and blue jeans, with the innocent magic of parties, rouge, low dresses, music, with everything silky, shining, glossy, transfigured, and yet everyday and serviceable, like a spool of mercerized cotton or a pair of transparent nylons reinforced at heel and toe.

  And Dr. Mulcahy, by the serving-table, quaffing fruit-juice punch and crunching cookies, waving jubilantly to his wife, arguing the quantum theory with a physics or a pre-med student, impressed for the boys and girls the die of authority on the gala, as a more personable teacher could not have done. This ugly, a-social man, at home and suddenly garrulous in their midst, shedding his terrors for them as his wife shed her spectacles, imparted to each and every dancer a sense of privileged participation, of having been chosen and honored, as though their act of choice in inviting him set them under a new dispensation, eventfully apart from the rest. These were not the remarkable students but the diffident, unoffending minority who, anywhere else but Jocelyn, would have been on top of the heap; and the knowledge that here the prerogative of extending the invitation weekly, of securing a sitter for the children, fell to them, of all people, rather than to their elders and betters, made them feel almost apologetic; their undeserved good fortune, surely, was a reflection on the Jocelyn system of values.

  In the eyes of such mild maiden freshmen as Sheila McKay and her two roommates, the dances came slowly to be conceived as an object-lesson to the college; this, declared the minority, timidly presenting its bill of particulars, is what we would like Jocelyn to be. To have a good attendance became urgent and exemplary, as winter closed in and beer-cans piled up in the leaf-choked rain-pipes of the boys’ dormitories and the poker-playing crowd kept the girls in the neighboring building awake all night Saturdays and swaggered in, unshaven, to Sunday breakfast in commons, boasting of no-hours sleep. Proselytization for the dances went on, concomitantly, at an intensified pace in the girls’ rooms—“Don’t go to Philadelphia this weekend; stay and go to the dance!” Having been taught by their mothers that the girl was always at fault if the boy drank or took liberties, the missioners applied this principle to the social situation at Jocelyn, and, perched on the foots of beds, in pajamas, with cold cream on their faces, in the bathroom with soap-dish and towel, argued earnestly against weekend absenteeism, indifferentism, laisser aller, capitulation to the status quo.

  They knew that at bottom the inert majority felt as they did: the girls’ rooms they visited were decorated with the same rag-dolls and teddy-bears, pink kewpies won at shooting-ranges, poufs and taffeta comforters, Mickey Mouse lamps, pictures of Mummy and Daddy in silver frames; the boys still had their lariats and bridles, souvenirs of the rodeo, autographed baseballs, bird-books—often, on the athletic field, on a clear fall afternoon, a boy would be seen flying a pale-blue kite into the blue sky. And yet agreement, they sorrowfully learned to recognize, was not tantamount to active adherence. In principle, most would admit that what Jocelyn needed in its social life was a certain modicum of formality and supervision. In practice, few, it seemed, were convinced by the assertion that Dr. and Mrs. Mulcahy had put new life into the dances by taking their chaperonage seriously. The majority would not consent to try out, even once, in action what it gladly conceded in talk, and, tendering promises of “another time,” “ask me later,” “give me a rain-check” (male), would follow the crowd as usual down to Gus’s roadhouse or off and away altogether. What disturbed the advocates of the dances most profoundly was the discovery of a fathomless paradox at the bottom of their friends’ thinking: in following the crowd, against their own will and judgment, they were following themselves, i.e., nobody.

  Moreover, the claim that the Mulcahys took their chaperonage seriously, queer as this sounded as an inducement to youth in a progressive college, actually touched on a vital issue. The tolerance of other chaperons had been the subject of much student dispute. Certain younger teachers had been courting popularity by winking at gross infringements of the rules, allowing the punch to be spiked, hip-flasks to be produced on the dance-floor, necking to go on unchecked; on one occasion, even, marijuana had been smoked on the steps of the gymnasium during intermissions, with the tacit, shrugging knowledge of the faculty-member present. More responsible teachers, asked to serve as chaperons, irritably refused to give their time. Others treated the affair condescendingly, as a lark, coming in late, wearing ski-clothes or rough tweeds patched at the elbows, dancing close with their favorites or with members of their own party—moist-eyed strangers out of the night, wrapped in bright scarves and smelling of liquor. To such teachers, who appeared to live for the pleasure-principle, chaperonage, plainly, was a vast jest or a tiresome imposition; progressive education was a jest, which you winked at and made your living off; the students were comic archetypes, fantastic humors, butts of an educational ideology or else simply fair game, trophies of an impersonal venery—every year there were rumors of seduction, homosexuality, abortion, lesbian attachments, and what shocked the students about these stories, some of them very circumstantial, was the fact that they appeared to take place in a moral vacuum, to leave no trace the morning after; the teacher was at his desk, unchanged, smiling, impassive, and the student’s grade, a C usually in these cases, showed no improvement for the encounter.

  Dr. Mulcahy, of course, was not the only instructor whose domestic life was regular, but he was the only one of the modernists who had a real sympathy for youth. He respected it in its integrity, its conservatism, its quest for forms, laws, definitions, ruling principles. Over his charges on the dance-floor, he exercised a jealous surveillance; woe to those intruders, Baal-worshipers, who tried to spike the punch when he was present. He did not dance, but his eye noted any disorder among the dancers; his p
lump finger signed; his head beckoned, vigorously nodded with approval when a jitterbugging pair desisted. Jingling a coin in his pocket against his wife’s compact and lipstick, he tested the beat of the music, relayed requests to the band or to the boy in charge of the records.

  To his wife, Catherine, he frequently called out, in his soft, caressive voice, which always sounded coaxing as if it were calling a kitten, to ask whether she were tired, whether he could get her something, obviously for the purpose of receiving her radiant negative, the shake of the white mantilla proclaiming to all present her unquenchable, dauntless vitality. A certain element of tender prearrangement seemed to enter into their public relation, as though she were a film-star and he her discreet devoted manager. The girls loved this, as a sort of testimonial or advertisement of the permanence of romance in marriage. They clustered about the coatroom early to get a glimpse of him on his knees, fumbling with the clasps of her overshoes, while she waited, complacent, tapping her free foot, brightly waving and signaling, powdering her pointed nose. She would kick the overshoes off one by one, with a deft arch of her satined foot and then, with an imperious gesture, slip her old black daytime coat with its fox collar from her strong, full, lotioned shoulders and toss it to him at the coatroom window, with a cry, “Catch, Hen,” clear, bell-like, commanding, and a flash of the even teeth. The conspicuous whiteness and evenness of those teeth gave her beauty an incisory quality.

  Dressed in their “date-dresses” or “semi-formals,” jeweled barrettes in their new-washed hair, the girls gazed at the pair with nudging, sympathetic smiles, like grandmothers watching babies in a play-pen, while the boys, garroted in neckties, their oiled hair striated with comb-marks, stood by with board-like faces, declining to see the meaning the girls squeezed out of this byplay; a few of the taller ones exchanged shrugs of irony that remarked on the married condition and on how the mighty had fallen.