Mary McCarthy

by Thomas Mallon

  The two young women’s eyes slowly canvassed each other. “One more thing,” said Martha, hurriedly, in an offhand tone but holding her friend’s gaze. “About the baby. It occurred to me last night that the reason I wanted one was because of them.” Dolly dropped her eyes. “You mean the Murphys,” she muttered, staring at the floor. Martha nodded. “They have a baby. I want a better one. It stands to reason. I never thought seriously of having one till we came up here.” Dolly’s figure stiffened, as though a pain had shot through it, as she listened to this abrupt confession. “You mustn’t say that,” she admonished. “I know,” gravely agreed Martha. “If I ever should have a baby, you must promise to forget that I told you. It may not even be true.” She tossed the last phrase off lightly and stood on tiptoe to give Dolly a kiss. Dolly received the kiss absently and remained where she was, leaning slightly forward, like a pillar, as she heard the door shut and Martha’s quick, lively step crackle the twigs in the path outside. The horn played a flourish, in farewell, and the pond sent the sound back, a distant airy cadenza.

  Dolly drew her thumb slowly across her jaw. She frowned. Her neat dish face wore a mazed look of consternation. She shook herself, dog style, and went, still frowning, to pick up the tea things. “You must not be shocked,” she said to herself aloud, in stern bell tones, as she headed toward the little kitchen.

  Six

  “YOU MUSTN’T be shocked by anything. That’s the first lesson for the artist,” said Sandy Gray, seriously. He was a tall Australian with a brown beard who had formerly been an art critic on an English magazine. He was wearing a black wool shirt, black dungarees, and black wading boots and was knocking out a black pipe on Dolly Lamb’s table. It was mid-morning. Dolly had been painting, on the ridge outside her house, when she saw a strange man striding through the pond toward her, cutting down the pickerel weed with a hunting knife as he went. She shaded her eyes to watch him, but he ignored her anxious figure, while making straight for the spot where she was standing—like a guided missile, she fancied. A mild, half-humorous fear crinkled her forehead. She was readily dismayed by the most ordinary encounters; everything for her was numinous—the butcher with his cleaver, the hunter in the woods. Her virgin heart feared the Angel Gabriel in the milkman, bumping along the road in his truck, and did not dare refuse the milk, cream, eggs, and butter he offered her, far beyond her small wants. Behold the handmaiden of the Lord—she lived meekly in the age of fable, amid powers that had to be propitiated. The intruder today, in a black visored cap, swashing through the pond, advanced on her like a superman from a comic book or the man from the telephone company; in either case, the same perplexity presented itself: who was to speak first? “Hello,” she called out bravely, when he was twenty feet away. “Hi,” he retorted and flailed his way up the slope to her easel. He studied her painting in silence, scratching his ear. He then walked into the house in his wet boots, followed by Dolly. “I’m Sandy Gray,” he stated, in a voice that took her aback by its softness. “Have you got a cup of coffee?” “Only instant,” confessed Dolly. “That’ll do,” he answered. “Fix us a couple of cups.”

  Out in the kitchen, as she put on the water to boil and measured out the coffee, she could see him, hunched on her studio couch, reading her copy of Art News, his black cap pulled down and his hunting knife stuck in his belt. Dolly was perturbed. Apprehension had told her who he was even before he had introduced himself: a typical backwoods blowhard, according to John Sinnott; a horrible boor, said Martha. He was a former Communist, it seemed, who made sandals in the summertime, for the tourist trade, and rode a motorcycle and used to feed his children on peanut butter and send them to school barefoot, till the S.P.C.C. stepped in. On no account, warned Martha, was Dolly to give him any encouragement, if he dropped by to call on her. His fourth wife had just left him, and he was on the prowl again. He would want to be neighborly and to advise her about her painting, but he was only after liquor and somebody to cook his meals for him.

  He did not need any encouragement, Dolly inwardly cried. He seemed so at home that it was she who felt like the interloper. When he had finished his coffee, he took his cap off, tossed it on the couch, and walked up and down her small living room, his thumbs stuck in his belt, examining her effects just as if he were alone in the house. He opened and closed the door to her bedroom, glanced up the chimney flue, picked up a picture postcard and scanned the message on the back of it. He stood for a long time staring at the books in her makeshift bookcase, lifted out one, riffled through it, and replaced it, upside down. During this inspection, not a word was spoken. Dolly’s soul was outraged, but her tongue refused to move. She did not know how to forbid him the extraordinary liberties he was taking. He behaved like a higher authority with a warrant to search out evidence of her personal tendency. As she sat, meekly watching, a thread of silvery humor wove in and out of her thoughts, tracing a delicate embroidery. At the same time, suspense began to mount in her; her heart beat faster under her pale-blue shirtwaist and golden chamois jacket. She could not escape the thought that he was here to pronounce a judgment.

  On the driftwood table, by the window, there was a bowl of poisonous mushrooms, brought her by the Sinnotts, which she had set up to paint. He bent down to smell them and made a noise of disgust. “Corrupt and dainty,” he said, in his soft, breathy voice. “Throw them out. They stink.” And before Dolly could protest, from her footstool by the fireplace, he had taken the dish from the table, opened the screen door, and flung the deadly mushrooms out into the pinewoods. “Damn you!” cried Dolly, jumping up indignantly. “You’ve just ruined my still life.” She confronted him, quivering, her arms akimbo, while he watched her, unperturbed, from his greater height. In a minute Dolly fell back, discountenanced by the grave look of his deep-set eyes, which swept back and forth, slowly, across her face, like two searchlights set in the bushy camouflage of hair and beard and brows. Having lost her temper and sworn at him, she found herself mysteriously translated onto a plane of intimacy, and she listened, a little bemused, as he proceeded to give her a lecture on decadence, with illustrations drawn from what he had found in her dwelling. The fact that he claimed to “know” her without even knowing her name imparted a sort of dreamlike solemnity to the home truths he was telling her; he descended on her like some meddlesome old prophet twitching the sleeve of a busy monarch with a message from on high.

  “Stop hoarding,” he said gently, pointing to her collection of seashells and to the starfish arranged in a graduated series on her mantelpiece. “It’s your own shit you’re assembling there, in neat, constipated little packages.” Dolly’s cheeks suddenly flamed. She was as a matter of fact given to constipation and she felt as if he had peeked into her medicine-cabinet and found the bottle of Nujol. Moreover, she detested coarse language. The British, she told herself dutifully, were less nice in their speech than the Americans. But even as she strove not to mind, not to be insular and puritanical, tears sprang to her eyes, and she had to wipe them away hastily on the sleeve of her jacket. “Are you shocked?” he asked with a face of polite inquiry. When Dolly nodded mutely, he stood pulling his beard and frowning. She expected that he was going to leave, in disgust with her, and she found that now, contrarily, as always seemed to happen, she wanted him to stay. “You’re angry with me,” she ventured in a small voice. He shook his head. “I try to be honest,” he explained, “and I hurt people, like an abrasive. I want to sand them down to their essentials, scrape off the veneers. When I saw your picture, out there, I knew I had something to tell you.” “You liked it?” she said wonderingly. “No. I hated it. It made me want to spew.” Her work was sick, he told her—cramped with preciosity and mannerisms. Underneath, he discerned talent, but it was crippled, like some poor tree tortured out of shape by a formal gardener. She needed to be bolder and freer.

  Dolly frowned. She had heard this from every one of her teachers and she supposed that it must be true. But it wearied and confused her to be assured that there was a vi
tal force imprisoned inside her that was crying to be let out. How did they know, she used to mutter to herself in secret outrage. If there was anybody else inside her—as far as she could testify—it was a creature still more daunted and mild and primly scrupulous than the one the world saw. For years, she had been trying obediently to be bold and free in her work, and the results had always been discouraging, even to her counselors. When she “let herself go,” her paintings got big and mechanical; she painted drearily, in the style of the teacher who had advised her to be herself. She was tired, moreover, of being told she had talent. She had come to feel that it was like a disease that she toted from doctor to doctor, seeking a new opinion, a new treatment. Her last teacher, whom she had stayed with a year, had been a neo-romantic; before that, she had had an intra-subjectivist and before that, a magic realist. And it was always the same story. Each began, enthusiastically, by undoing the errors of his predecessor. That was the easy part, but what came next, supposedly—the leap forward, the breakthrough—never was accomplished. She parted from each master sadly, with the knowledge that she had disappointed him. Perhaps it was her money, Martha had lightly observed; perhaps she was like the rich young man in the Bible, who could not accomplish his breakthrough unless he sold all he had and gave to the poor. . . . Dolly resented this suggestion; she had been thinking about it in the last few days, pacing up and down the wooded path with her hands dug in her pockets. Everybody, she felt, had been trying to change her, to take something away from her. For the first time, all alone here, with her teeth gritted, she had dared think that it was she who had the right to be disappointed. In the silence of her house, her heart murmured against her teachers and well-wishers; they had promised miracles and then let her down.

  As she listened to Mr. Sandy Gray, echoing the familiar cavils, this resentment suddenly exploded. “But I am precious,” she exclaimed, leaning forward on the footstool and striking a blow on her chest. “I’m inhibited. I’m afraid of life. I’m decadent. That is me. Why can’t I paint that if I want to?” Sandy Gray smiled. “You can’t paint a negation,” he said. Dolly clenched her fists. “What about Bosch?” she demanded, seizing the name arbitrarily as a standard to rally to. “Bosh, my dear girl,” he answered. “You know better than that. Horror isn’t a negation. Only fear. You mustn’t be afraid.” Dolly sighed. She could not tell him the truth: that every moment of her life was shot through with terrors; peril stirred all around her, whimsically, in the rustling of the trees, in the sound of the icebox running or the gurgling of kerosene in the tank. This was what she was straining to show in her painting: the absurd powers that were bending her to their will—nature as animate and threatening and people as elemental forces. But what her critics saw in her small canvases was only “meticulous craftsmanship,” “timid conceits,” “quaint charm.” If they did not urge her to break through, they advised her to illustrate children’s books.

  “Are you afraid of me?” Sandy Gray queried. Dolly considered and then shook her head, smiling. Strangely enough, she was not; she was only afraid of what the Sinnotts would think of her for letting him stay so long. He was so much like one of her bogeys that she could deprecate his terrors. He had come out of the pond just like a myth, she said to herself with amusement. She was far more fearful of what she called normal people: John and Martha, for instance.

  Even if they had not told her, she would have known how her visitor looked to them. She could borrow their sharp eyes, alas, as easily as she could have put on Martha’s severe, horn-rimmed reading glasses. To the normal vision, Sandy Gray was just another rusticated bohemian, solemn and loquacious and self-vaunting, a not-very-intelligent and pretentious bore. And yet, to Dolly’s eyes, there was something Christlike about his appearance. His hair and beard were a soft, delicate brown. His skin was white, and he had deep-set, light-brown eyes with strange bluish whites. He carried himself stiffly, almost as if he had a spinal injury, and his long arms were frail. The black shirt and jeans and boots and gruff manners were deliberately misleading. He was really a gentle person.

  As soon as she had said this to herself, Dolly felt a defiant quiver of pleasure. She had two kinds of friends: those she described to herself as “gentle” and the others. The second kind was always criticizing the first kind and saying they were unworthy of her. The more the second kind criticized, the more she clung to the first. Her aunts, who themselves were oddities in the New England manufacturing town she came from (one of them smoked cigars and was deaf and enormously fat), always used to complain that she had odd, unsuitable friends. They would never let her choose her pets either, and all her life Dolly had felt herself in the position of a little girl in a big house stealing out to give a saucer of milk to a stray cat, which, as her aunts used to warn her, was probably diseased. She had loved her aunts; she loved John and Martha and all the other sensible, sharp-spoken people who had succeeded to her aunts’ place in knowing what was right for her—her trustees, her teachers, and their European-born wives, who fixed her hair for her and put mascara on her quivering lashes, before an art opening, and told her when to let her hems down and how to walk into a room. These rational guardians of her interests were all somewhat alike; the world admired them, and so did Dolly. Her “gentle” friends were all different, resembling each other only in the stubborn quaintness of choice that had selected them. She had the queerest collection, picked up on her travels, priests and nuns, elderly doctors with tropical diseases, destitute baronesses, progressive high-school principals, housewives, young soldiers, broken-down artistes; many of her friends were children. A psychiatrist once told her that she was afraid of being overrun by strong people and sought out weak ones, whom she could protect. This was not quite exact, Dolly herself recognized. Everybody wanted to tyrannize over her, the weak far more insistently, she had to admit, than the strong, who sometimes had other things to think about than telling her what to do.

  She was taken in too easily, her trustees said, examining her check stubs. But that was not the case. She knew very well when she was being exploited by the kind of person she called gentle, and she claimed the right to be exploited, hugging it to herself like a toy that somebody was trying to wrest from her. Down deep, in the bedrock of her soul, there was a mistrustfulness of good sense. Behind every caution, she suspected a deprivation; something was being withheld. The demand to see for herself, ever since her thirtieth birthday, had been developing into a secret mania; she wanted to live. Outwardly, she was just the same, quiet and decorous, but in her soul she pioneered obstinately, inverting every notion that was offered her, especially where people were concerned. Much as she loved John and Martha, whenever she was with them she had to fight off the suspicion that her judgment was being constrained.

  The first night she had arrived here, they had had her to dinner and put her to bed afterward, in their guest bedroom, despite her insistence that she wanted to sleep in her own house. The water was not turned on yet, John pointed out, and the house would be damp and cold from having been shut since Labor Day. In the morning, he would settle her in and see that everything was in order. He and Martha were extraordinarily helpful; they loved preparations and bustle and giving advice. After dinner, in their parlor John had handed Dolly a list of all the people she might need: the plumber, the electrician, the laundress, the odd-job man, the woman who would clean, if Dolly wanted her. Her garbage, he said, she would do best to take to the dump, and, for one person, it was wiser not to have the milkman; better buy milk when she needed it from the store. Between them, they had thought of everything. They told her the best places to swim at this time of year and where to get the freshest eggs. John drew a map, showing where mussels were to be found, on the old pier, and where you could dig clams and collect oysters; he marked some painting sites on it in red pencil, with stars. Martha made him show where the Indian pipe grew and where a file of cigar-colored boletus marched down a sand road, like a Mexican army on parade. They did everything, Dolly felt, but paint the pi
ctures for her, so eager were they to be useful and anticipate her needs. It was a sign of love, and she knew it; moreover, it was a sign of intelligence. She was pleased (or had been, until today) with the painting ideas they had given her, which suited her painstaking brush. The frail Indian pipes, gray-white shading into pink, with a delicate black fringe on the petals, like a glass-blower’s flowers, had turned out awfully well; the boletus picture was not finished, but the conception was splendid.

  And John had done everything for her, without being asked. He had come to put back the screens when the late mosquitoes bothered her and he had dug her a garbage pit when he saw that she did not like to take the can to the dump, which had a horrible smell and rats and human scavengers, eagerly picking over the refuse. He chopped some pine wood for her and found out what was wrong when the chimney smoked. Martha had come, with extra pots and pans and dishes. She had brought Dolly a cook book with the best recipes marked. And she always knew the best; that, to Dolly was the worst of it. If Dolly followed instructions, everything came out right; and if she tried a different recipe from the one recommended by Martha, the result was a disaster. The Sinnotts always knew; it was an instinct with them. And they never compromised or pretended that anything was other than it was. This quality had never failed to amaze Dolly, in all the years she had known them—their sense of life’s topography. Everything in New Leeds was where they said it was and looked precisely as they had described it, the good and the bad, the wilted lettuces and withering carrots in the grocery-store bins, the sunset from Long Hill. When Dolly, hopefully, would find that they had been wrong in some particular, it would turn out that she had not followed the directions. John, especially, was a born guide. After a day in Hell—Dolly felt certain—he could conduct a guided tour of all the circles, walking ahead with his long, bounding step, commenting on the architecture and pointing out the denizens whom it would be worth while to meet.