Mary McCarthy

by Thomas Mallon

  This grief terrified Dolly. She was afraid to speak to him, because any word from her would seem false under the circumstances, for she was not really sorry that he had lost the children, but only sorry for him—more awed than sorry, if the truth were told. She felt very remote from him and small, like a fly speck, because she could not share whatever it was he was feeling. This sense of distance was increased when he came into her cottage and set the pint down on the table, two-thirds empty. He took her face between his hands and began to kiss her, wearily, as if he did not want to. An awful smell came from him, of vomit and raw whiskey; his tongue was sour in her mouth. Slowly, he took her clothes off and told her to lie down on the studio couch. But then, when he was naked, nothing happened; he could not get up an interest, though she did as he directed. All night, he kept retching in her bathroom and coming back to lie with his damp head in her bosom. She was terribly hungry, but he would not let her make tea and toast, to settle his stomach. “Stay here,” he said, whenever she endeavored to move. “We’ll try again in a minute.” “It doesn’t matter,” Dolly would answer, gently, stroking his sweating head. But he could not get the idea of an obligation to her out of his mind. He fell asleep, still fitfully muttering of “having another try.” Just before dawn, Dolly faced the facts, covered him with a blanket and a comforter, and crept into her own bed.

  Eleven

  MARTHA’s first response, when she woke up one morning in November to find that her breasts were sore, was a canticle of joy. At last, she said to herself, with a great leap of her soul. John, next to her, was still asleep; she muted her exultant thoughts for fear they would wake him. It was far too soon to tell him since of course she could not be sure. Yet there could hardly be any doubt. This swelling was one of the recognized signs. She well remembered the terror of waking up in her college bed on bright May mornings to find that her nipples hurt when her nightgown rubbed against them. At that time (she still frowned a little to think of it), she had fought with might and main not to know what was the matter with her. She must have bruised herself, she had kept insisting, during senior play rehearsals, in the fencing scene: she was Hamlet, naturally, and the girl who played Laertes had been clumsy with the foil. You were not pregnant, she had tried to believe, unless you threw up in the mornings. She had not thrown up and she had played Hamlet and graduated, without anyone’s knowing. But she had had to have a dangerous abortion, right after Commencement; the abortionist told her she had waited too long. One’s physiology, she now assured herself, did not change; the soreness could only mean that.

  She began to count back, trying to remember when her last period had been. She was tempted to wake John and ask him if he knew. But she did not want to trouble him yet. He would be of two minds, she recognized, about the baby. The money part would worry him, and the responsibility; men thought of those things first. And he would fret because the baby would be encroaching on her time. On the other hand, he knew how much she wanted a child and wanted to see him as a father; he underestimated, she was certain, his own capacity for this role. He was a sort of sport in his family, and he was afraid that a baby of his would turn out like his brothers, whom he had never got along with. Indeed, he told her gravely, the chances were that he would dislike it, since he disliked most people. To Martha, as a woman, all this was nonsense. She was confident that their child would be exceptional. Moreover, what John would see was that the baby would be an incentive. For its sake, they would work harder, earn more money, improve their characters.

  She smiled at herself for these thoughts but her conviction remained unaltered. They were foolish, romantic notions, but she and John were romantics, both of them; they had to have goals and visions. A baby would take up her time; there was no denying that. But Martha had found that the less time you had the more you were able to do. When she had been doing graduate work and acting at the same time, she had accomplished more—John admitted this—than she ever had before or since. It was like the miracle of the loaves and fishes: she had even managed, somehow, to do some theatrical reviews and to cook too, on the days when the maid did not come. She had been happy and newly married; that was perhaps the reason. But she would be happy with a new baby; so would John, if only because happiness was catching. They both, moreover, responded well to pressure from the outside, which was why, doubtless, it had been a mistake to come to the country. But the baby would make up for that.

  To bring in extra money, for her confinement (Martha laughed delightedly at the word), she could do another adaptation. Her Wild Duck was still earning royalties; only last week, they had got a check from a stock company that was going to do it in Cambridge. A producer had been after her to do a Strindberg; John had made her say no, because of what he called her own work. But the beauty of adaptations was that you could do them at odd moments.

  She could translate, between feedings, when the baby would be asleep. And they could save, if they had a real motive. They could give up those two drinks at six o’clock, which were becoming almost regular. And wine, which they always had for company and even, sometimes, when they were alone. She would not be allowed to drink when she was pregnant anyway. And it was bad for the child when you were nursing. They could save on food too. They could live on milk and apples and salt codfish and the various kinds of dried beans and clams and salt pork and cornmeal; there were dozens of ways of doing them, cassoulets and brandades and bacalhaes and polentas and gnocchi, besides Indian pudding and chowders and baked beans. She might even make bread, which she had always wanted to do. She was naturally extravagant, but she was sure she had a capacity for sacrifice. During the last two years of the war, when she was married to Miles, she had managed wonderfully with ration coupons.

  She could do all the laundry herself, instead of taking the sheets and towels and shirts to the laundress. She would make more soups, and they could collect oysters regularly, the way the Coes did. She would sew all the baby’s clothes herself. And perhaps she could hemstitch some handkerchiefs for John, as part of his Christmas present. She could even, she supposed, take up knitting, though she hated women who knitted. Could she learn to make chic sweaters and sell them to a luxury market?

  Martha shook her head ruefully. She was too enthusiastic: all her ideas tended to become “follies.” She would have to curb this tendency or John would think her irresponsible. She remembered one Christmas, when she was married to Miles: she had got the pomander ball craze and had made four dozen pomanders out of oranges and cloves and sweet spices. They were supposed to be an economy; she was going to give them as presents. But Miles thought they were silly and they had all stayed in a drawer, tied up in silk ribbons, till they finally got burned up in the fire. She had not changed a bit. Given the slightest prompting, her mind began to indulge itself in woman’s page fancies. She loved domestic chores: the smell of furniture polish, the damp, hot scorch of fresh ironing. And she hated having her time hoarded and rationalized for her, because of her little bit of talent. She did not want to become what she called a machine à écrire. Drowsily, defiant, she laid down her terms. She did not propose to feed the child out of horrid jars of baby food; she would make beef teas and custards and purée vegetables herself, no matter how long it took. She had done these things for Barrett, when she was his stepmother. That was the only virtue of being married to Miles: the servants were always leaving, so that she had been able to housekeep without his interference.

  Now she could do it again. As these words passed through her mind, John stirred. His slender arm disentangled itself from the bedclothes; he peered sleepily at his watch. Remorse immediately crushed Martha. How selfish she was! What she had really been thinking was that now she would not have to finish her play. The baby was a reprieve. A gloomy look darkened her eyes. John would not let himself see how distasteful the play was to her. Actually, it was almost finished, but she had started rewriting it in order to stave off the moment when she would have to show it to him. Then he would know—what she herself had fe
ared for two months—that she was merely pretending to write a play. But he was not interested in the truth, she had been saying to herself rebelliously, when she heard him go off whistling after he had settled her in her writing room: he was satisfied when he had her penned up in the little white room, going through the motions of writing. No wonder she looked on a baby as an escape into reality.

  But perhaps he was right, she hastened now to emend. Perhaps these qualms and doubts were only the natural by-products of artistic production. Perhaps she could really bring it off, thanks to him and his freshly sharpened pencils waiting for her in a glass on her desk, like a bouquet, every morning. Being pregnant, which already deepened her love for him, might make her try harder. There was said to be a euphoria of pregnancy, which might be beneficial to her writing. Yes, she said to herself, firmly: we will have the baby, and I will finish the play too. That will satisfy everybody.

  “Hello, darling,” she murmured, leaning forward to receive his kiss. All at once, her eyes widened; she swallowed and glanced aside. “What’s the matter?” he said anxiously, seeing the shadow cross her face. “Nothing,” said Martha, slowly climbing out of bed. “What would you like for breakfast?” In the kitchen, she examined the calendar, put water on for coffee, and then took her clothes into the bathroom, bolting the door. She was trying to remember when the Coes’ play-reading had been. On a Friday, she felt certain, and she had started menstruating on a Monday. But was it the Monday before or the Monday after? “When did you go to Boston?” she started to call out, but checked herself in time. It was strange that she could not remember positively and yet not strange, for, having no fear of pregnancy, she no longer kept track of her periods. She started to count on her fingers, ticking off this week, last week, the week before, but she found she could not count straight. Sweat stood out on her pale forehead. She tried to get at the date another way. She had had the curse, she remembered, one day when they had a picnic with Dolly, and John had warned her not to go swimming because she would get cramps. The water had been icy, so that it must have been late in October. Dolly had had the curse too. If John would only go out, she could call Dolly and ask when she had had it; Dolly was the sort of girl who kept track. But Dolly, of course, had no telephone. Warren’s mother’s death, she recalled abruptly. That would date it. She could call Jane after breakfast and find out for sure.

  At once, she began to feel better. There was no reason to worry until she had talked to Jane. She combed her hair and did it up. She looked at herself in the mirror and could see no difference in her face. In the kitchen, the water was boiling. She could hear John in the parlor, shaking down the coals. Everything was all right. She was certain, now, that the picnic had come after the play-reading. “What’s the matter, Martha?” He had been watching her while she squeezed the oranges. “Nothing,” she said, smiling. “Was I making faces? I was thinking about the play.” The play, she thought, wryly, was some good. He was used to seeing her brood about it.

  As soon as the breakfast dishes were finished, she went into her study and shut the door. It was no use calling Jane. Martha knew perfectly well that the picnic had preceded the play-reading. They had not had a picnic since the big storm that week end. She sat down at her writing-table and buried her head in her hands. How was it that she had never even considered the possibility that Miles might have made her pregnant? Without actually forgetting it, she had dismissed that night from her attention; John often said that she had an unconscious as strong as a horse. After the next day, the day Warren had left, she had hardly given Miles a thought. She was through with him for good; he held no further interest or terror for her. He was as dead as a clinker. And, strangely enough, except for the play, she had never felt happier or more secure with John. The air had cleared that night. She had stopped being haunted by the past, and John had stopped being haunted by the future. He had relaxed; she could tell from the way he slept. That was why it had seemed so fitting that they should have been rewarded this month with a child.

  It could not be Miles’s, Martha said to herself, boldly, hammering on the desk. Her feminine instinct, her very bones told her that it could not be. If it were Miles’s, she would be throwing up and rejecting it. She would not have waked up happy this morning. Statistically, all the chances were against it. If she had slept with Miles once during the month, she had slept with John repeatedly. If she were pregnant, it could not be Miles who had caused it.

  He simply could not be the father of an embryo inside her. Statistically or otherwise, the idea was too unlikely. It was well known that a woman could not conceive right after her period; that was what Catholics called one of the “safe times.” She and John had been making love all through the “fertile” days—the ovulation period. If she were pregnant, the baby must be John’s. It was the reason she had been seeking for their return to New Leeds.

  Martha frowned. She had not intended to write this morning. How could she be expected to with this uncertainty weighing on her? Nevertheless, to her surprise, she found herself inserting paper in her typewriter and beginning to type out the second act. It was two o’clock in the afternoon when John knocked at her door, with a tray of sandwiches and milk. “You must have had a good day,” he said approvingly. “Yes,” said Martha, with a start. It was true. She had had an amazingly good day; her “condition,” if it were one, had completely slipped her mind, and it only recalled itself to her, like a shadow, as she began to drink her milk.

  She did not think about it again till the next morning, when she woke to find that her breasts were still sore. This time, she was immediately conscious of an unpleasant, disturbing emotion, as if all night she had been having bad dreams. She rehearsed the same arguments, proving to herself that the baby, if there was one, had to be John’s. By the time she was dressed, she had convinced herself again. Again, she went to her study and wrote the whole morning, “losing” herself in the characters. In the middle of the afternoon, while she was marketing, she was positive that she had started to menstruate. But when she got home with the groceries, she found she was mistaken. That night they had dinner with the Coes. The next morning, she woke up rigid, literally scared stiff. Her only wish was to go back to sleep and dream that she had dreamed this. But she was wide awake.

  A baby was a baby, she said to herself suddenly. What difference did it make whose it was? No one would ever know.

  “But I would know,” she whispered. “Or, rather, I wouldn’t know. That would be just it.” Supposing, for the sake of argument, she were to let the child be born, without saying anything, what would follow? Assuming the worst, it might look like Miles; it might have red hair. But this was not the worst. If it looked like Miles, then at least she would know; other people would merely find a strange coincidence and somebody would talk about her Viking ancestors—Jane Coe or Miles himself. A new thought made her feel faint. If it looked like him, Miles would know! He would try to assert a claim on it, somehow. She would finally be what he had always wanted: the mother of his child. And even, she reasoned, if the child did not look like him, Miles might still decide that it was his. That is, if he thought about the dates. Fortunately, he was unnoticing in such matters: he could never remember that Thursday was the maid’s day off, and Sunday and Daylight Saving took him unawares, like giant firecrackers exploding under him as he sat, reflecting, on a sofa. But Miles was inconsistent; this one time he might notice and count back. In fact, with his suspicious nature, if a glint of the thought came to him, he would assume that the child was his, without further question. She could not tolerate this, even if it were only an inkling in Miles’s brooding mind. He would destroy all of them, given this opportunity. If he were to let on to John, John would probably kill him and go to jail for life. That would eliminate Miles, but she could not permit it. She would have to kill Miles herself.

  These melodramatic possibilities were not highly likely, but they could not be ignored. She could not run such risks. It occurred to her that she and John could l
eave New Leeds, leave the country, even, to get away from Miles. This, she recalled with bitter irony, was exactly where they had started, when she had thought of kidnapping Barrett. It seemed as if there were something preordained in their situation that wished to condemn them to eternal exile, like poor Vronsky and Anna, like the Duke of Windsor: “Vil spectacle aux humains de la faiblesse de l’amour.” And this was not the worst. The worst would be not to know herself, for certain, whose the child was. If John should ever find out, he would share this misery. She knew very well what they would do; they would set out to have another child at once, just as if this first one were a defective. And this first one, poor waif, would always be a special case. They would always be looking at it for a clue as to whose it was. Whenever it was bad, John would be sure it was Miles’s. She herself might love it too intensely, in order to compensate for the doubt. In any case, she could not trust herself to give it a normal life; for her, with her speculative tendencies, that would be impossible, no matter what her intentions. Already, she could feel pity for this unborn being suffusing her, and pity was very unreliable, as a guide to conduct. It signified a conquered repugnance.

  But all this, she told herself, was perhaps too abstract. When the baby was born, she might forget all these doubts and simply take it as it was, for its own sake. What if she and John had adopted an orphan, a foundling? They would not care for it any the less because its parentage was unknown. Ah, she replied: but there was a great difference between the totally unknown and a knowledge that has been narrowed to a choice between two possibilities. It would be idle to speculate about a foundling.