Mary McCarthy

by Thomas Mallon

  And as he hurried off to telephone Cathy, he did indeed see, he believed, something which had not come under Alma’s notice: the older woman, surely, was devoured by pride and watchful envy of the younger and wanted to have all the honors of a disinterested action to herself. She it was of course—how crudely she had given herself away!—who had talked the stupid Domna carefully out of the limelight. The girl had been all set to resign yesterday afternoon—she had told him so herself—and had simply let herself be bamboozled out of double billing. Yet it was clever of Alma, he had to admit, to have fixed on the typically Russian preoccupation with motive to divert the girl from her own rightful claims on celebrity; nothing would have served so well. The conceit of the “noble” action, he said to himself, chuckling, l’acte gratuit, the selfless, improvident, senseless, luxurious, spendthrift action, this had touched the soft spot of the little iron maiden, so resolved to distinguish herself from the others, the mere canaille of the faculty whose ancestors had had to work for a living, by the implacable purity of her motives. He was in no mood now to carp at this jousting of the two ladies for favor, which had a certain charm as well as a higher utility; all honors to Alma for carrying off the first round of the tourney. Yet even as he fancied them caparisoned for battle, another idea genially obtruded itself, like the gloss of a Marxist critic; he smiled sardonically as he walked.

  In Domna, he was ready to wager, there was a fond of shrewdness, a sharp mother-wit, as there had been in old Tolstoy, that knew which side its bread was buttered on. The silken shirt under the peasant blouse—he had heard Domna hotly deny this story related of the old sinner, and then, characteristically, defend it by paradox. After all, the Marxians were not so wrong to look for the economic base—with Alma out, Domna would be the reigning précieuse of the department, with a step up in rank, very likely, and a nice little salary hike. He would not be surprised, for that matter, if Alma herself did not have another appointment tucked up her sleeve. More power to her, he thought succinctly; so long as she kept it dark. And yet, along with his relief, if this should be so, he admitted to a certain wry disappointment which made him dismiss the suspicion as if it had come from someone else.

  Having been persuaded, faute de mieux, to accept Alma’s resignation in its present and no doubt irrevocable form, he was free at last to take a satisfaction in it that had been coursing through him all along, like a subterranean rivulet which he had tried dutifully to hold within bounds but which now bubbled up in a freshet of joy and, yes, brotherhood. He longed to share with the incredulous, infidel world the glad news of what Alma had done for him, the splendid finality of the thing, a bursting of the bonds of materialism and selfishness that turned the wintry morning, as he sped along, chin burrowed in his coat-collar, into an Eastertide. And as he walked, he argued sotto voce with an imaginary opponent, a devil’s advocate who tried, of course, to strip the act of its significance, reduce it to the level of things seen every day. How many others, answered Henry, would have been equal to it; how many cases could you name in recent academic history where such solidarity has been manifested, straight off, the first crack out of the box, without anybody’s asking for it? He nodded to passing students, promising himself that in time these too would hear what Cathy’s condition unfortunately now interdicted, and yet at the same time he wondered whether everybody’s well-meant efforts at secrecy could keep the story, once it broke, from spreading like wildfire on the campus. Howard Furness would soon be talking and Miss Crewes, of course, Maynard’s secretary—how could you hope at Jocelyn to keep such a scandal under wraps?

  “I told her,” he said breathlessly to John Bentkoop, whom he ran up against in the main building, in the milling, mid-morning crowd by the mail-safes, “I told her that there were things one couldn’t accept, that I was grateful to her for her warmheartedness, but that I couldn’t willingly see her expose herself to the proscriptions of our present era, which hasn’t been surpassed, I assure you, since the times of Sulla or Diocletian. After what I’ve been through myself, I couldn’t permit another human being. . . .” He broke off as a few curious students began to collect at his elbow. Young John withdrew a long hand from his mail-safe, glanced through his mail leisuredly, and gripped Henry’s shoulder. “Easy,” he advised in his cavernous and yet fraternal American voice. “That’s Alma’s affair, Hen; you must let her take care of it.” Under his gaze, which warningly identified them, the students moved off. He was a follower of Niebuhr and Barth, a farm-boy of the region who had gone to Jocelyn on a scholarship, lost his faith and regained it through the medium of anthropology. Every word he uttered had a weight of great consideration, and his deep young voice creaked, like a pair of high shoes ascending a dark stairway with precaution. He had large, grave brown eyes, with a strange blackish glitter in their depths, a long face, lantern-jawed, but rather winsome, and a crew haircut. “The time may have come in Alma’s life,” he pontificated, “when a change may have great value. We don’t make such decisions until we’re inwardly prepared for them. You may have been merely the necessary stimulant for a fruition long overdue.” A dim smile, touching his cheekbones, like a ray of light falling from a clerestory, indicated that this remark was illuminated by the comic spirit.

  Mulcahy recognized, with discomfort, that he had begun on a false note. Nevertheless, he persisted. “No, John,” he said apologetically, “you’re all wrong. There’s no need to pretend that everything is for the best in the best of all Leibnitzian worlds. This is going to be an awful wrench for Alma. Her whole life and her memories are here. She’s made an extraordinary sacrifice. She doesn’t pretend otherwise, and I’m grateful to her for not pretending. She said in so many words that she wished me to know what I was worth to her, what my continuance here was worth to her and to all my friends.” Bentkoop’s jaws flexed, but he said nothing. Mulcahy saw in a disillusioning flash that none of these “friends” cared to hear of Alma’s sacrifice, lest it be construed as a demand on themselves, like those oral pledges made at charitable meetings. “Naturally,” he went on, with a short laugh, “I don’t expect everybody to commit suttee for me. Though just between ourselves, I have a suspicion that Domna and Alma are vying for the honors of the widow’s pyre. I really shouldn’t say that,” he added, seeing a shade of interest cross the young man’s face. “It’s all Alma’s show and more credit to her. Amazing woman, don’t you think?” In his refusal to be dislodged from his topic, he found himself beginning to babble. “But I must tell you, she had a wonderful formulation, quite in character for her, straight out of the feminist movement, with the sound of the doors slamming in the Doll’s House. She said ‘there’s no other way for a man or an institution to learn that one is serious than to learn it too late.’ ” He looked at Bentkoop expectantly; Bentkoop gravely nodded. “I have a tutee coming; how about you, Hen?” he interposed, with just a hint of admonishment. Mulcahy had the unpleasant feeling that all through this conversation there had been pity for himself in the atmosphere. He had already missed an appointment this morning and wondered if Bentkoop knew it. Bentkoop had the office just across the hall and often left his door open, as though to spy on his comings and goings. “Very likely,” he said shortly. “They keep changing their hours. I can’t keep track of them. Half the time I wait there and they don’t show up. Then they have the hypocrisy to go and complain to the registrar.”

  “Come on, boy,” said Bentkoop equably, with again that nuance of understanding in his manner, as though, thought Mulcahy spitefully, he were guiding a drunkard past a beckoning saloon door. They walked back across the campus together.

  “I imagine Maynard is on the hot seat this morning,” confidently remarked Mulcahy, as they came abreast the Administration Building; he could not resist a final allusion to Alma’s coup de foudre. “Poor fellow,” observed John, unexpectedly. Mulcahy’s eyes dilated. “What do you mean, poor fellow?” he scornfully cried. “I should think I was more to be pitied. Or Alma.” Bentkoop gripped his arm again; he wor
e a long dark back-belted coat of a cheap shaggy material much affected by priests and young existentialists. “Don’t harrow yourself so, Hen,” he murmured, with a moved note in his deep voice that touched and surprised Mulcahy. “Don’t deliberately try to think we’re all against you. I’m on your side, boy. Surely Domna told you. What I meant was simply that I shouldn’t like to be in Maynard’s shoes. A man who does a foolish thing is more to be pitied than his victim, provided the victim has recourses. How would you like to be opening Alma’s letter, receiving petitions, listening to deputations . . . ?” Henry’s heart gave a surge of happiness. “Deputations?” he ventured.

  John kicked away a clinker on the walk. “So I understand,” he said. “But who?” marveled Henry. “When?” “Domna and myself, I believe,” answered John casually. “It’s not been decided for certain yet. There’s to be another meeting, I’m told, at lunch-time. You know, Hen, if I were you, I’d try to stay out of this thing as much as is humanly possible. Everything’s being done that can be done, as they tell the patient’s relatives. This is an operation; anesthetize yourself till it’s over any way you know how. You’ll only alienate sympathy if you don’t keep your hand out of it. You have more at stake than we have, which makes you more eager, more fearful that we’re not doing the right thing by you. You can’t help it, but the public doesn’t like it. That’s the terrible thing about victims,” he added thoughtfully. “In fact, you could define a victim as one who must be more concerned about himself than anybody else is for him. Even Christ on the cross had such a moment: ‘My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me?’ ”

  “You’re right,” exclaimed Henry. “You’re right.” For the second time that morning his heart was swollen with gratitude; tears came to his eyes at being understood, finally, after years of what he now understood to have been a mere fancied neglect. The idea that he had been at fault toward his colleagues entered his mind and was welcomed. “You don’t know what it means to me to be set right when I need it. People seldom speak plainly to me; it must be my own fault. I repel it with my arrogance, I suppose. I’ll try to do what you say, John; keep out of it till it’s over. No more back-seat driving. And yet, truthfully, my nerves are so bad that I hardly know whether I’m up to it. What do you think I should do, John, go home and stay there for a day or so and let Domna run the show?” “How much can you keep from Cathy?” replied John, glancing at him sidelong, with a certain curiosity. “Very little, in the past,” admitted Henry. “It’s not as though I’d had side affairs and were a practiced deceiver. Sometimes I feel sure she’ll smell it on me, like liquor or another woman.” “Better not try to stay home then,” advised Bentkoop, with what sounded like a slight loss of interest. “Stick it out here as well as you can. Work, you know. The great anodyne.” He paused as they climbed the broad stone stairs and purposefully lowered his voice. “By the way, Hen, there’s some sort of rumor around that this thing has gotten to the students. They even say that there’s a petition circulating. Do you know anything about it?”

  Henry held himself taut. Experience had taught him that surprise of all reactions was the most difficult to imitate, for one was always an instant too late. He therefore remained immobile, as though frozen to stone by what he had heard, while considering what to say. “I don’t believe it,” he finally said, in measured tones, biting off the words, one by one. John scratched his ear, which had a rather pendulous lobe from being pulled, thoughtfully, in many a long discussion. “So they say,” he repeated. The moment prolonged itself, awkwardly. “I heard it,” he added, as though apologizing, “from Bill Fraenkel, who had it from a student. There’s a girl, Lilia Something, a freshman, who’s supposed to be passing a petition.” Mulcahy laughed. “Why, I don’t even know her,” he cried with exuberance; for a reckless moment, he had been on the verge of an admission, which the slightest real encouragement from Bentkoop might have succeeded in wringing out of him. “It just goes to show how the smallest thing gets distorted and magnified. I never heard of the girl. Probably some student grievance petition that has nothing to do with me, and Bill Fraenkel gets wind of it and tries to make me responsible.” He stopped and gnawed his lip. “As a matter of fact, John,” he suggested, “Fraenkel was in the store yesterday when I was talking to Domna—” Bentkoop put an end to this speculation. “Let’s hope you’re right,” he cut in, on a note of weariness. “I’d hate to see the students get their teeth in this one. Bad business, Hen. Bodes no good for anybody, including you, you know. I’d like to see this thing settled quietly. Maynard’s amenable to reason if you don’t force him out on a limb. If you do, there’ll be a fight, I’m afraid, and somebody’s likely to get hurt.” He scratched his ear again. “Technically, I assume you know, Hen, Maynard’s well within his rights. Since you don’t have tenure, he’s not obliged to show cause.” He broke off and held open the storm door for Mulcahy, who preceded him into the vestibule. Despite this deference, natural and proper from a younger man to an older, Mulcahy felt suddenly uneasy, as though binoculars were trained on his back.

  This religious young man, he suspected, had been giving him a series of tips, like one of God’s strong men or gangsters; there was an aura of pleasant-spoken omniscience about him that reeked of spiritual blackmail. Could he be seeking to convert him to Protestantism by establishing a ghostly commerce with his conscience? Bentkoop held open the inner door, and again Mulcahy passed through ahead of him but pulled up and waited while Bentkoop stamped nonexistent snow from his overshoes. How he dallied, observed Mulcahy; as though expecting a keyword to be passed, like a priest who sits secure in the confessional, confident from long experience of the sins that will come tumbling out! Nothing further, however, was said, beyond a short good-bye, as they discerned their tutees waiting outside their separate doors. The interview, thought Mulcahy, as he unlocked his office, had a curiously raw, unfinished, and provocative quality, as if, to state it flatly, Bentkoop knew something. He felt a sudden interest in discovering Bentkoop’s real motive for supporting him, for Domna’s explanation—that Bentkoop wished to see at least one theist in the Literature department—seemed to Mulcahy all at once terribly thin and unconvincing: if this was one’s motive, one would certainly not avow it at Jocelyn. Impatiently, he wrote off the human element: Bentkoop was too intelligent to be taken in as the others were. There was something else, he was certain, some inscrutable purpose, of which he himself was either the tool or the beneficiary.

  Ushering the student in, he took stock of the boy, wondering whether this weedy sophomore could be trusted to carry a message to Sheila McKay without letting the whole campus in on it, yet scrupling as to whether to call off the petition—if indeed there was one in existence—merely on Bentkoop’s say-so. There were certain interests, he abruptly perceived, notably Mr. Maynard Hoar’s, that might be very well served by having a student movement nipped in the bud; and what could be cleverer than to persuade him, through the mediation of Mr. Bentkoop, their agent, to do the job himself. It went without saying that the Administration cabal would have a spy planted, yet who would have thought they could have acted so promptly and with such amazing foresight? And what a masterstroke, he breathed, to have their spy actually appointed to serve on the proposed deputation, with only Domna to ride herd on him, a shy, high-minded girl with no experience of academic politics. Yet still, in the back of his mind, Mulcahy seesawed, accepting a paper from the student and running his eyes absently over it, while his pencil jotted corrections of spelling and punctuation: was he not being too astute, he rebuked himself, and ascribing to them a cleverness which was an attribute of his own intelligence and quite out of keeping with their own clumsy maneuvers?

  It was always possible that Bentkoop had spoken to him in all good faith and sincerity, to warn him of what might be a costly mistake in timing, in which case he would do well to heed the admonition and curb his impatient disciples before they could do him harm. And yet how had Bentkoop known to come directly to him? There were a thousa
nd ways, he assured himself, in which the students could have got hold of the story without his intervention. Why behave as if he had set the damned petition afoot? A spasm of irritation shook him. He could not determine where their machinations ended and his own, over-active intelligence began the work of conjecture—it was the old philosophical stickler: how to distinguish the mind’s knowledge of its objects from its experience of its own processes? In short, can we know anything, he muttered under his breath and raised his eyes from the paper. “Before we get on to this, Jerry,” he commenced, “could you take a message for me to one of your fellow-tutees? Don’t give it to just anybody in the dormitory. See that you tell her personally. Sheila McKay. Tell her to come to see me directly after lunch; she forgot to take her assignment and I want to explain it to her.” The boy nodded. “Glad to, Dr. Mulcahy. Do you want me to go now?” The teacher smiled at this alacrity. “No,” he said, lightly, seeing with relief and a certain pale regret that the name, Sheila McKay, had no special meaning for Jerry, and that the petition, therefore, could not be making great headway, “afterwards will do very nicely.”

  CHAPTER VIII

  The Deputation

  DOMNA AND JOHN BENTKOOP sat side by side on a small horsehair-covered sofa in the anteroom of Maynard Hoar’s office. They both looked extremely nervous, like a young couple being detained in the waiting-room of a doctor’s suite or an employment or adoption agency. The role they were about to play in the history of academic causes was in the foreground of their thoughts, so that they glimpsed themselves from the outside and strove for a correct demeanor that would combine assurance with naturalness. But merely by keeping them waiting, Maynard Hoar had turned the tables on them, so that they came, they began to fear, not as advisers, amici curiae, but as petitioners, facing an interrogation. Conscious of Miss Crewes, the secretary, typing in the next room, they spoke in slightly raised voices of indifferent matters, meanwhile exchanging certain eye-signals commenting on the furniture, which reflected a recent visit to Wanamaker’s on the part of Mrs. Hoar. The room had been redone, to cite the Alumni Bulletin, “in the spirit of the old College,” with white walls, white straight linen curtains, and black Shaker reproduction chairs. On the walls were dark paintings of the first presidents, clergymen and theologians, a primitive engraving showing William Penn and the Indians, and a pastel portrait of the Founder done by a woman friend. On a table, beside the catalogue and a brown glass ash-tray, was a framed snapshot of Maynard, fishing in a local stream. Domna indicated this, and John gave a short laugh, which came out over-loud, like a bray. To cover himself, he got up and pretended to examine the picture. Domna became immersed in the catalogue.