Mary McCarthy

by Mary McCarthy

  “I don’t want a bath,” she asserted stubbornly. “I’m perfectly clean.” But she knew, of course, that she had not bathed since she left New York, and, if she had been allowed to go her own way, would not have bathed until she reached Portland—who would think of paying a dollar for a bath on the train? In the ladies’ room, where soot and spilt powder made a film over the dressing-tables and the hair receivers stared up, archaic as cuspidors, one sponged oneself hastily under one’s wrapper, and, looking at one’s neighbors jockeying for position at the mirror, with their dirty kimonos, their elaborate make-up kits, and their uncombed permanents, one felt that one had been fastidious enough, and hurried away, out of the sweet, musty, unused smell of middle-aged women dressing. “I’m perfectly clean,” she repeated. The man merely pressed the bell, and when the porter announced that the bath was ready, shoved her out into the corridor in his Brooks Brothers dressing-gown with a cake of English toilet soap in her hands.

  In the ladies’ lounge, the colored maid had run the bath and stood just behind the half-drawn curtain, waiting to hand her soap and towels. And though, ordinarily, the girl had no particular physical modesty, at this moment it seemed to her insupportable that anyone should watch her bathe. There was something terrible and familiar about the scene—herself in the tub, washing, and a woman standing tall above her—something terrible and familiar indeed about the whole episode of being forced to cleanse herself. Slowly she remembered. The maid was, of course, her aunt, standing over her tub on Saturday nights to see that she washed every bit of herself, standing over her at the medicine cabinet to see that she took the castor oil, standing over her bed in the mornings to see if the sheets were wet. Not since she had been grown-up had she felt this peculiar weakness and shame. It seemed to her that she did not have the courage to send the maid away, that the maid was somehow the man’s representative, his spy, whom it would be impious to resist. Tears of futile, self-pitying rage came into her eyes, and she told herself that she would stay in the bath all day, rather than go back to the compartment. But the bell rang in the dressing-room, and the maid rustled the curtain, saying, “Do you want anything more? I’ll leave the towels here,” and the door swung to behind her, leaving the girl alone.

  She lay in the bath a long time, gathering her forces. In the tepid water, she felt for the first time a genuine socialist ardor. For the first time in her life, she truly hated luxury, hated Brooks Brothers and Bergdorf Goodman and Chanel and furs and good food. All the pretty things she had seen in shops and coveted appeared to her suddenly gross, superfatted, fleshly, even, strangely, unclean. By a queer reversal, the very safety pin in her underwear, which she had blushed for earlier in the morning, came to look to her now like a symbol of moral fastidiousness, just as the sores of a mendicant saint can, if thought of in the right way, testify to his spiritual health. A proud, bitter smile formed on her lips, as she saw herself as a citadel of socialist virginity, that could be taken and taken again, but never truly subdued. The man’s whole assault on her now seemed to have had a political character; it was an incidental atrocity in the long class war. She smiled again, thinking that she had come out of it untouched, while he had been reduced to a jelly.

  All morning in the compartment he had been in a state of wild and happy excitement, full of projects for reform and renewal. He was not sure what ought to happen next; he only knew that everything must be different. In one breath, he would have the two of them playing golf together at Del Monte; in the next, he would imagine that he had given her up and was starting in again with Leonie on a new basis. Then he would see himself throwing everything overboard and going to live in sin in a villa in a little French town. But at that moment a wonderful technical innovation for the manufacture of steel would occur to him, and he would be anxious to get back to the office to put it through. He talked of giving his fortune to a pacifist organization in Washington, and five minutes later made up his mind to send little Frank, who showed signs of being a problem child, to a damn good military school. Perhaps he would enlarge his Gates Mills house; perhaps he would sell it and move to New York. He would take her to the theater and the best restaurants; they would go to museums and ride on bus tops. He would become a CIO organizer, or else he would give her a job in the personnel department of the steel company, and she could live in Cleveland with him and Leonie. But no, he would not do that, he would marry her, as he had said in the first place, or, if she would not marry him, he would keep her in an apartment in New York. Whatever happened she must not get off the train. He had come to regard her as a sort of rabbit’s foot that he must keep by him at any price.

  Naturally, she told herself, the idea was absurd. Yet suddenly her heart seemed to contract and the mood of indulgent pity ebbed away from her. She shivered and pulled herself out of the tub. His obstinacy on this point frightened her. If he should bar her way when the time came . . . ? If there should be a struggle . . . ? If she should have to pull the communication cord . . . ? She told herself that such things do not happen, that during the course of the day she would surely be able to convince him that she must go. (She had noticed that the invocation of her father inevitably moved him. “We mustn’t do anything to upset your father,” he would say. “He must be a very fine man.” And tears would actually come to his eyes. She would play that, she thought, for all it was worth.) Yet her uneasiness did not abate. It was as if, carelessly, inadvertently, almost, she had pulled a switch that had set a whole strange factory going, and now, too late, she discovered that she did not know how to turn it off. She could have run away, but some sense of guilt, of social responsibility, of primitive awe, kept her glued to the spot, watching and listening, waiting to be ground to bits. Once, in a beauty parlor, she had been put under a defective dryer that remained on high no matter where she turned the regulator; her neck seemed to be burning up, and she could, at any time, have freed herself by simply getting out of the chair; yet she had stayed there the full half-hour, until the operator came to release her. “I think,” she had said then, lightly, “there is something wrong with the machine.” And when the operator had examined it, all the women had gathered round, clucking, “How did you ever stand it?” She had merely shrugged her shoulders. It had seemed, at the time, better to suffer than to “make a fuss.” Perhaps it was something like this that had held her to the man today, the fear of a scene and a kind of morbid competitiveness that would not allow the man to outdistance her in feeling. Yet suddenly she knew that it did not matter what her motives were: she could not, could not, get off the train until the man was reconciled to her doing so, until this absurd, ugly love story should somehow be concluded.

  If only she could convert him to something, if she could say, “Give up your business, go to Paris, become a Catholic, join the CIO, join the army, join the Socialist Party, go off to the war in Spain.” For a moment the notion engaged her. It would be wonderful, she thought, to be able to relate afterwards that she had sent a middle-aged businessman to die for the Republicans at the Alcazar. But almost at once she recognized that this was too much to hope for. The man back in the compartment was not equal to it; he was equal to a divorce, to a change of residence, at most to a change of business, but not to a change of heart. She sighed slightly, facing the truth about him. His gray flannel dressing-gown lay on a chair beside her. Very slowly, she wrapped herself in it; the touch of the material made gooseflesh rise. Something about this garment—the color, perhaps, or the unsuitable size—reminded her of the bathing suits one rents at a public swimming pool. She gritted her teeth and pulled open the door. She did not pause to look about but plunged down the corridor with lowered head; though she passed no one, it seemed to her that she was running the gantlet. The compartment, with its naked man and disordered bed, beckoned her on now, like a home.

  When she opened the door, she found the man dressed, the compartment made up, and a white cloth spread on the collapsible table between the seats. In a few minutes the waiter of the night befo
re was back with orange juice in cracked ice and corned beef hash and fish cakes. It was as if the scenery, which had been struck the night before, had been set up again for the matinee. The difference was that the door remained shut. Nevertheless, though there were no onlookers, atmospheric conditions in the compartment had changed; the relationship of the pair took on a certain sociable formality. The little breakfast passed off like a ceremonial feast. All primitive peoples, she thought, had known that a cataclysmic experience, whether joyful or sad, had in the end to be liquidated in an orderly meal. The banquets in Homer came to her mind, the refreshments the Irish put out at a wake, the sweetmeats the Arabs nibble after love, the fairy stories that end And-the-king-ordered-a-great-dinner-to-be-served-to-all-his-people. Upheavals of private feeling, like the one she had just been through, were as incalculable and anti-social as death. With a graceful inclination of her head, she accepted a second fish cake from the waiter, and felt herself restored to the human race.

  There was to be no more love-making, she saw, and from the moment she felt sure of this, she began to be a little bit in love. The long day passed as if in slow motion, in desultory, lingering, tender talk. Dreamy confidences were murmured, and trailed off, casual and unemphatic, like the dialogue in a play by Chekhov. The great desert lake out the window disappeared and was replaced by the sagebrush country, which seemed to her a pleasant, melancholy symbol of the contemporary waste land. The man’s life lay before her; it was almost as if she could reach out and touch it, poke it, explore it, shine it up, and give it back to him. The people in it grew distinct to her, though they swam in a poetic ambience. She could see Eleanor, now an executive in her forties, good-looking, well-turned-out, the kind of woman that eats at Longchamps or the Algonquin; and then Leonie, finer-drawn, younger, with a certain Marie Laurencin look that pale, pretty, neutral-colored rich women get; then herself, still younger, still more highly organized—and all the time the man, a ludicrous and touching Ponce de Leon, growing helplessly older and coarser in inverse relation to the women he needed and wanted.

  And she could see the Brussels carpet in a Philadelphia whorehouse, where he had first had a woman, the old Marmon roadster in which he and Eleanor had made love, and the couch in her father’s house where the old man had surprised them, and also the squash court at the club, the aquamarine bathtubs in his house, the barbecue pit, the fraternity brothers, the Audubon prints in his study, the vacuum bottle on the night table. Somehow it had become essential to them both that she should know everything. They might have been collaborators, drawing up a dossier for a new Babbitt. This is what I am, he was saying: the wallpaper in the larger guest room is a blue and white colonial design; I go to bed at ten and Leonie sits up and reads; I like kippers for breakfast; we have Hepplewhite chairs in the sitting room; the doctor is worried about my kidneys, and I feel lonely when I first wake up.

  There were the details, the realistic “touches,” and then there was the great skeleton of the story itself. In 1917 he was a chemistry major, just out of the state university, with a job for the next year teaching science at a high school, and plans, then, for a master’s degree, and perhaps a job in the department at Cornell, where he had an uncle in the Agricultural School. The father had been a small businessman in a Pennsylvania coal town, the grandfather a farmer, the mother a little lady from Tennessee. But then there came the Officers’ Training Camp, and the brilliant war record, and the right connections, so that the high-school job was never taken, and instead he was playing handball at the Athletic Club in the evenings and working as a metallurgist for the steel company during the day. Soon he was moved into production, but somehow he was too amiable and easygoing for this, and in the days when he thought he was going to marry Eleanor, he was glad to get out and go into the coal business. When he came back to the steel company, it was as a purchasing agent, and here his shrewdness and bonhomie were better employed. He became Chief Purchasing Agent and Fourth Vice-President; it was doubtful whether he would ever go further.

  For ten years, he confided, he had been visited now and then by a queer sense of having missed the boat, but it was all vague with him: he had no idea of when the boat had sailed or what kind of boat it was or where it went to. If he had married Eleanor? But she was not the type; after eight years they had both seen that and were still good friends. Would he have done better to take the teaching job? It hardly seemed so. Plainly, he was no scientist—the steel company had seen this at once—and, had he taken that other road, at best he would have finished as the principal of a high school or the head of the chemistry department in a small-time state university. No, she thought, he was not a scientist manqué, but simply a nice man, and it was a pity that society had offered him no nicer way of being nice than the job of buying materials for a company in Little Steel. The job, she saw, was one of the least compromising jobs he could have held and still made money; by regarding his business life as a nexus of personal friendships he had tried to hold himself aloof from both the banks and the blast furnaces. He was full of fraternal feelings, loyalties, even, toward the tin salesmen and iron magnates and copper executives and their wives who wined him and dined him and took him to the latest musical shows over and over again. (“Don’t mistake me,” he said, “most of those fellows and their women are mighty fine people.”) Still—there was always the contract, waiting to be signed the next morning, lying implacably on the desk.

  Here he was, affable, a good mixer, self-evidently a sound guy, and yet these qualities were somehow impeached by the commercial use that was made of them, so that he found himself, as he grew older, hunting, more and more anxiously, for new and non-commercial contexts in which to assert his gregariousness. He refused the conventional social life of Cleveland. At the country club dances, he was generally to be found in the bar, shooting dice with the bartender; he played a little stud poker, but no bridge. In New York, he would stay at the Biltmore or the Murray Hill, buy his clothes at Brooks Brothers, and eat—when Leonie was not with him—at Cavanagh’s, Luchow’s, or the Lafayette. But the greater part of his time he spent on trains, talking to his fellow-passengers, getting their life stories. (“Golly,” he interjected, “if I were a writer like you!”) This was one of his greatest pleasures, he said, and he would never go by plane if he could help it. In the three and a half days that it took a train to cross the continent, you could meet somebody who was a little bit different, and have a good long visit with them. Sometimes, also, he would stop over and look up old friends, but lately that had been disappointing—so many of them were old or on the wagon, suffering from ulcers or cirrhosis of the liver. . . .

  He spread his hands suddenly. There it was, he indicated; he was sharing it all with her, like a basket lunch. And, as she accepted it, nodding from time to time in pleasure and recognition, supplementing it occasionally from her own store, she knew that the actual sharing of his life was no longer so much in question. During this afternoon of confidences, he had undergone a catharsis. He was at rest now, and happy, and she was free. He would never be alone again, she thought; in fact, it was as if he had never been alone at all, for by a tremendous act of perception, she had thrust herself back into his past, and was settled there forever, like the dear companion, the twin, we pray for as children, while our parents, listening, laugh. She had brought it off, and now she was almost reluctant to leave him. A pang of joy went through her as she examined her own sorrow and found it to be real. All day she believed she had been acting a tragic part in something called One Perfect Night, but slowly, without her being aware of it, the counterfeit had passed into the true. She did not understand exactly how it had happened. Perhaps it was because she had come so very, very close—tout comprendre, c’est tout aimer—and perhaps it was because she was good at the task he had assigned her: at the sight of his life, waiting to be understood, she had rolled up her sleeves with all the vigor of a first-class cook confronting a brand-new kitchen.

  “I love you,” she said suddenly. “
I didn’t before, but now I do.”

  The man glanced sharply at her.

  “Then you won’t get off the train . . . ?”

  “Oh, yes,” she said, for now at last she could be truthful with him. “I’ll certainly get off. One reason I love you, I suppose, is because I am getting off.”

  His dark eyes met hers in perfect comprehension.

  “And one reason I’m going to let you do it,” he said, “is because you love me.”

  She lowered her eyes, astonished, once more, at his shrewdness.

  “Hell,” he said, “it’s a funny thing, but I’m so happy now that I don’t care whether I ever see you again. I probably won’t feel that way after you’re gone. Right now I think I can live on this one day for the rest of my life.”

  “I hope you can,” she said, her voice trembling with sincerity. “My dear, dear Mr. Breen, I hope you can.” Then they both began to laugh wildly because she could not call him by his first name.

  Still, he had not quite relinquished the idea of marrying her, and, once, very late in the afternoon, he struck out at her with unexpected, clumsy ferocity.

  “You need a man to take care of you,” he exclaimed. “I hate to see you go back to that life you’ve been living in New York. Your father ought to make you stay home in Portland. In a few years, you’ll be one of those Bohemian horrors with oily hair and long earrings. It makes me sick to think about it.”

  She pressed her lips together, and was amazed to find how hurt she was. It was unthinkable that he should speak of her way of life with such contempt; it was as if he had made a point of telling her that her gayest, wickedest, most extravagant hat was ugly and out of fashion.

  “But you fell in love with me because I am Bohemian,” she said, forcing herself to smile, to take a wise and reasonable tone.

  “No,” he said, in a truculently sentimental voice. “It’s because underneath all that you’re just a sweet girl.”