Mary McCarthy

by Thomas Mallon

  “Poor John,” she asseverated, trying to feel some solicitude as she started down the stairs again. “Poor John.” But as soon as she saw him, scowling, seated at the kitchen table, sucking his hand, annoyance supervened. His moaning and swaying distracted her as she cut the strips of adhesive. When she tried to get the bandage on, she found that the strips were too short. “For God’s sake, let me do it!” her husband exclaimed. Martha’s heart quivered. Her delicate brown eyes opened wide and a tear stood in each of them. As she began to cut fresh strips, in silence, the two tears dropped, like gentle reproaches, onto the cherry table.

  John Sinnott watched her sullenly. He knew that he had hurt her feelings deliberately, and he felt no remorse. Another time, Martha’s honesty and ineptitude would have touched him: she could not pretend to sympathize with what to her was an unseemly display. Appreciative of this—indeed, it was this straightness he admired in her—John nevertheless was enraged. The cut throbbed; he felt sick at his stomach. And he blamed her. Yes, that was the irrational thing. He blamed her, not only for her childish clumsiness with the bandage (she was clever enough with her fingers when it came to cooking and sewing and could make the prettiest tray for you when you were sick in bed with the doctor!) but for the cut itself. The instant his hand had gone through the window, a frantic rage had seized him. He had tried to discharge it elsewhere—on the tenant, the previous owner, the drunken, irresponsible handyman—but it was Martha’s toothbrush and lipstick and pale tortoise combs, lying on the window sill, that claimed the blame. Tears of fury had risen to his eyes. His own toothbrush and hairbrush and toothpaste lay on the sill, too. But he could not see them; all he could see was Martha—her lipstick, which rolled to the floor, her handyman, her tenant, her window. And all he could hear now was Martha’s voice, clear in his memory, murmuring that they ought to have shelves and a medicine cabinet in the downstairs bathroom. He suddenly stamped his foot on the floor and snatched the bandage away.

  This was the way affairs had been going ever since they had come back to New Leeds to make a better life. The slightest thing that went wrong made him see Martha in it, though he would not say so. “I didn’t think of you at all,” he would demur if she protested that he blamed her, whereas in fact she was always in his mind, concealed under the appearance of a windstorm, a bare patch in the lawn, a piece of broken glass, a defective battery. He dwelt in an anthropomorphic world peopled by her impulsive mistakes. Yet the cardinal mistake, which was to come back here at all, he considered his own responsibility. Martha hated New Leeds—that is, its social aspect. This hatred, John had decided, was her safeguard. They could come back here because the place had no temptations for her; she had no wish to be a part of it again. They had come here, he announced, to be alone, so that Martha could write the play that he believed she could do, if she could get the right conditions.

  And what was wrong with that, he furiously wanted to know. He had stern faith in Martha. He had seen her through three years during which she acted on Broadway while studying for her Ph.D. in philosophy, and three more years in which she did odd jobs—writing theater notices, recording novels for the blind, making a new translation of The Wild Duck for an off-Broadway production—and one year that was wasted in false starts on her play. He was used to making decisions and sacrifices on her behalf. He had stuck to a dullish job in the Historical Society, six days a week, so that Martha could be free not to work on radio or television. He had done this voluntarily and over Martha’s protest—she did not altogether like to be believed in. They had come to the country because he had decreed that it was time for them both to be serious, which was impossible in the city, with the telephone going all the time.

  And, morally speaking, there was no reason John could see why they should not have chosen New Leeds; they had no wish to mingle in the community. Yet ever since Labor Day, from the moment they crossed the threshold, each of them had known that they had blundered, and had known that the other knew. But John’s military mentality would not admit of an error once their forces were committed. It incensed him to hear Martha talk blithely of “our” mistake, as she named it. She knew as well as he did that there was no retreat. He had quit his job to come here. Their small capital—the sum of two legacies—was tied up in the house. Every day there were new, unforeseen expenses: yesterday the pump, which Martha had put on the blink by leaving a faucet running; today the window, which would cost a dollar for a new pane, even if he puttied it himself. He had earned no money since they had been here; neither had Martha. She refused to worry about money and kept talking about improvements and additions. After only a month, he was sick at heart and scared. It was ironic for him to think that their seventh wedding anniversary was coming in November; seven years, they had once agreed, was the fatal span for love. At night, he still slept with Martha wrapped tenderly in his arms, but by day, more and more, he sensed that she conspired against him.

  What frightened Martha, for her part, was the ebbing of concern. She had caught herself several times forgetting John’s existence when he had gone to the village for a few hours. They did not even quarrel the way they used to. Now, for example, once the bandage was on, they were no longer cross, though they had given each other ample provocation. He glowered and she looked sad, but underneath, she knew, neither of them felt a single thing. Martha would have liked to go back to the parlor and pick up her sewing or her book, but it did not seem quite polite to do so while John was in pain. John, she saw, wanted to lie down, away from her insistent gaze. But she could not let him be, because they had once been in love. “Lie down now,” she urged, half-heartedly. “I’ll put your things away.” But he at once smelt a reproach in her offer. “I’ll do it,” he retorted. “Just go away and leave me alone.” Martha glanced out the window. The sun was setting, and wood would have to be brought in for the dining-room fireplace before it got dark; if his tools were not put away, the dew would rust them. She knew very well that if he went into the bedroom, he would not come out for some time, and it exasperated her that he refused to know this simple fact about himself. She did not in the least mind getting the wood—why should she? What she minded was his self-deception. In his place, an honest person would have said thank you, and left it at that. She started to speak and halted herself, taking full credit for not saying what was on the tip of her tongue, but her glance out the window had said it all for her. “I’ll do it!” he cried, jumping up. He retired to the bedroom and theatrically slammed the door.

  Martha shrugged. He had left her in a cruel quandary. Whatever she did now he would interpret as a criticism. If she left the tools to rust, however, they would criticize him longer. Therefore, Martha tiptoed resolutely out of the house, found his hammer and screwdrivers and puttying knife, shut up the workshop, loaded a barrow full of locust wood, and wheeled it up to the dining-room door. The beauty of the evening, following on the cut and the quarrel, gave her a sense of solitariness. The single golden quince on the bush by the kitchen door, the virid brilliance of the grass in the locust grove, the flock of birds flying southward had a terrible pathos for her, as if they were orphaned in space. She stood in the doorway a long time, feeling sorry for every natural thing that surrounded them. From this vantage point of desolation, she even pitied herself and her husband, impersonally, seeing them as two wan specks, no bigger than the birds against the greenish-gold sky.

  Sighing, she shut the door and laid the fire in the dining room. As usual, immediately after sunset the house turned cold and drafty. She poked up the fire in the parlor, threw on fresh coal, and endeavored to read calmly. But she soon became conscious of the ticking of the unpolished Empire clock on the mantel. She glanced at her wrist watch, which had been losing twenty minutes a day, ever since she went swimming with it in the bay the first week, and at the clock, which gained ten, and tried to get the right time by mental algebra. They were going to miss cocktails, probably, if John did not get up. A surge of fear went through her. Everything in their lives
was strung on order and precision. When they had decided to venture to New Leeds, they had said to themselves that they must be orderly and dignified; otherwise, they would surely go to pieces, like everybody else who came here.

  It was an “artistic” community, beyond the commuting range, and Martha knew its perils, perhaps better than anybody, having got away from it whole and able to tell the tale. She had been telling it for years now, with her gay, floating laugh, to incredulous outsiders who thought she was exaggerating when she related the truly horrible mishaps that befell the various “free lances” and their wives who had come here to gather dust, on a pair of small incomes and the revenue from an August rental. People always said that Martha was exaggerating or that she was “very clever,” which amounted to the same thing. But Martha only spoke the literal truth, as John could attest—that was her peculiarity.

  And the essence of New Leeds was a kind of exaggeration. Everything here multiplied, like the jellyfish in the harbor. There were three village idiots, grinning, in the post office; the average winter resident who settled here had had three wives; there were eight young bohemians, with beards, leaning from their pickup trucks; twenty-one town drunkards. In wife-beating, child neglect, divorce, automobile accidents, falls, suicide, the town was on a sort of statistical rampage, like the highways on a holiday week end. Nothing in New Leeds happened once only. When Martha’s house burned to the ground while she was living with her first husband, it was the third house that year to catch on fire. Defective wiring, nodded the old-time winter residents, chewing the fat in the paper store. And while she thought she knew the cause better than the village chorus, the element of repetition still terrified Martha when she remembered the fire; it was as if she had lost, at that time, the principle of individuation and was simply a number in a series.

  Every afternoon, now, when she and John went to the pond to swim, they passed the foundation of the burnt house, still standing, surrounded by lilac bushes. John drove past it as fast as he could, but Martha always turned to look, and then dropped into a mood of despondency. It had been a fire-law violation, pure and simple, that had caused the fire, in her opinion. When the workmen were taking down the ugly old overhead lighting fixture in the dining room, she had let them stuff the wires back into the ceiling and just plaster over. She knew it was a fire hazard, but she had done it to save money, at her first husband’s insistence. And he had not let her tell where the fire had started when the inspector came from the insurance company. It was normal practice, he averred, to cheat an insurance company—they expected it. That was why they charged such big premiums. It was a neurotic desire to ruin him completely that was prompting her to tell the truth, he said. Martha did not think so, but one never could be sure about such things. (Motives did not matter, John and Martha had agreed, the first day they met, seven years ago, on the beach; you should never be deterred from a good action by the suspicion that your motive was bad.) In any case, it still haunted Martha to think that she might have saved the house, or the clothes, at least, and the books and pictures, if she had wakened her snoring mate when she first smelled smoke coming from the direction of the dining room instead of lying there, assuring herself that it was her imagination. They had had a party that night, and though she had not been tight, exactly, she had had five drinks, counting cocktails, and her first husband had still been drunk and was crashing around stupidly in the hedge, like a maddened buffalo, when firemen came.

  Drink, no question, was one of the chief local dangers. Martha said people came here because they wanted to become alcoholics and were looking for a Rome to do as the Romans did in. All artistic communities, she admitted, presented this problem, but New Leeds was worse than most because it had an unusual number of reformed or reforming alcoholics, who threw the drinkers into glum relief. In a village of four hundred souls, there was a strong chapter of the W.C.T.U., to take care of the locals, and a branch of A.A., with regular Wednesday meetings, even out of season, to take care of the “foreigners.” Liquor was one of the things, John and Martha had warmly agreed when they first came up, last spring, to get the house ready for the tenant, that you had to be on guard against. Consequently, they made a point of having just one cocktail when they were alone, at six o’clock. In actual fact they often had two, but when they did, they had begun to look away from each other, in embarrassment, as though not to witness the other’s fall from grace. The joy of drinking was gone. The slender brimming glass had taken on an aspect of fatality; they looked through the pale Martini to the possible future, its precipitate, lying like dark lees in the bottom.

  And it was typical of New Leeds that you could not take a drink without wondering whether you might become an alcoholic. Everything here cast a menacing shadow before it, a shade of future perdition. There was something sinister, John admitted, in the fact that you could not get anything repaired. There was nobody to fix the clock; the man who sharpened lawn mowers had died during the summer and nobody succeeded him; the local laundry service could not clean a suit without tearing and discoloring it; the garage-man’s only accomplishment was the ability to scratch his head. Everything in the village was relentlessly running down, buckling, warping, mildewing—including the human beings. Or so it suddenly seemed to Martha, coming back like an epilogue to announce the changes that had befallen the inhabitants by slow stages: the town highway superintendent become the titular town drunkard, indistinguishable from his predecessor, in faded blue shirt and lurching overalls; the pretty young girls from the soda fountain staring at her as if helplessly from sausage casings of fat; the gay, smart wives mottled and bedizened, fantastically got up in shawls and peasant bangles—when two of them got together, John said, they made the First National check-out look like a fortune-tellers’ convention. New Leeds was, literally, the seacoast of Bohemia. When John looked at the bare patches in the lawn or Martha at her wrist watch, they each felt a stir of terror. The wrist watch, in particular, frightened Martha, for never before in her life had she gone in the water with her watch on, and she could not explain how she had done it, for her wrist, as she repeatedly told John, had felt empty. He, too, she knew, was troubled by the watch incident, just as she today was alarmed and irritated by the cut, which was really too New Leedsian for comfort. They had begun to survey each other mistrustfully. Each feared that if the other let go, for an instant, the construct of their lives would crumble like stale cake frosting.

  At the outset, Martha had declared that it was too great a risk to come back, even though her former husband was no longer in the village at all but fifteen miles off, with a new house and a brand-new wife, with a larger income than usual, and a baby. She and John, she said, had all the ominous qualifications for a New Leedsian residence: two tiny incomes, an obscure fame (Martha’s), a free-lancing specialty (John’s), and the plan of doing something original. Why should they be different from the others, who were filed away here like yellowed clippings in a newspaper morgue—the ex-lawyer who ran a duck farm, the oysterman who had gone to Harvard, the French vicomte who had an antique shop in the summer and clerked in the liquor store in the winter, the plumber with his degree in fine arts, the illustrator who had once been married to a screen star, the former Washington hostess who now took paying guests? Many of the New Leedsians had once had talent or ability; you could see the buried traces if you looked for them, as you could find Indian flints and stone arrowheads in the debris on Long Hill. Your typical New Leedsian, as pointed out in the post office, had a name that rang a bell somewhere, far, far away; you felt you should have heard of him even if you hadn’t.

  Why, then, had they come here, Martha’s friends asked her, if the place was as fatal as she said? The answer was that she did not know. Neither she nor John had ever intended such a thing. It had happened by accident. John had been sent by the Historical Society to photograph a house farther down the coast; they themselves had been looking for a place of their own on the seashore. It was a Columbus Day week end, not quite a year
ago. The inn they had meant to stay at was closed; they still had friends in New Leeds, and on an impulse they had telephoned them and taken the ferryboat—for the first time in six years. Martha had forgotten how beautiful New Leeds was out of season, with its steel-blue fresh-water ponds and pine forests and mushrooms and white bluffs dropping to a strangely pebbled beach. “There’s a house for sale here,” suggested their hostess, with a shrewd offhand look at both of them as they sat side by side on her sofa. “Oh, no,” said Martha quickly. But she had given in, and they had all gone to look at it, just for the fun.

  It was, alas, a house she remembered—her favorite house in New Leeds, a pale-yellow eighteenth-century cottage with two red brick sides, set in a green locust grove, with a little avenue of poplars. They picked a single silver-pink climbing rose from a trellis—Mrs. Van Fleet, thought Martha, giving it to John for his button-hole. There was a spring somewhere back in the woods, the real-estate agent said, and an abandoned house site with lilacs and white old-fashioned double narcissi—thirty-five acres of land and the whole thing dirt-cheap. The agent remembered Martha, very gallantly, and politely gave no hint of remembering John, who had been here only two weeks that momentous summer. It was the nicest house, by far, and the cheapest they had seen anywhere—early eighteenth century, John concluded after examining the doors and fireplaces. It was a little shabby, but they liked that. There was an outside study for John, and a workshop, with an old chimney; there were apples, pears, grapes, roses, box; they could rent it in the summer months, if they wanted, and make a very good income. There was no heating, but they could put in an oil floor furnace or get along the first year with kerosene stoves. The woods were full of timber, and every room had a fireplace, which would see them through till Thanksgiving. It had electricity, a bathroom and a half, and some furniture.