Mary McCarthy

by Mary McCarthy

  Leo’s plan seemed as good as another. It was at least a starting-point and each man in his own mind quickly began to modify it to suit his own notion of the possible. Macdermott, in one part of the room, was proposing a pamphlet to set forth Leo’s ideas to the small public of intellectuals whose names he retained in his files. Jim Haines envisioned an open letter to his former publisher—short, terse, factual, to be illustrated by a huge balance sheet comparing the cost of Operation Peace (as he provisionally titled it) with Operation War. Susan imagined a campaign of letters and telegrams to Senators and Representatives. Ed Jackson suggested a hook-up with the World Federalist people. Taub wondered whether the idea could not be grafted onto the mind of some prominent personality (a journalese term that had become dear to him). Desmond thought of a diocesan letter; Danny Furnas, of working with the trade unions. The capture of a college president indicated itself naturally to several, and the radio announcer kept jumping up and offering to return to the air under their sponsorship.

  But when a roll call was ordered to distribute the work of these proposals, an enormous number of practical obstacles to doing anything whatever suddenly made themselves felt. There was a rush of volunteers for typing, mailing and filing, but the originators of the key suggestions began, one by one, to find reasons why their ideas were unworkable. Haines, with a certain shambling embarrassment, got up to explain that the Open Letter, on which everyone had, above all, been relying, would require the help of a research-girl, not to mention a financial expert: he did not have the Marshall Plan figures here or the details of our military loans; the shipping costs would have to be calculated, and the fees of the technical advisors—in short, he had been too hasty. Mac’s pamphlet, he suggested, would be much more to the point. Katy Norell, when called upon, had an abrupt recollection of certain uncomfortable interviews in the office of her college president; she could write to him, she supposed, she said doubtfully, but surely there was someone else who would be able to approach him more easily. Ed Jackson was obliged to admit that his connection with the World Federalists was rather tenuous; it might be better, on second thought, to try the United Nations. Susan still declared herself ready to compose a letter to her Congressman, but unfortunately she had forgotten his name. Danny Furnas knew the names of several of the younger trade union chiefs; they, however, did not know his. “You’re pretty thick with those boys, Jim; maybe you could help me out.” Jim Haines’ dark rumbling voice spoke easily. “Can’t say as I am, Danny.” Everyone in the room became instantly certain that he was lying. Desmond, who had buried his fine head in his hands, savagely, as if wrestling with his demon, suddenly looked up. “I would be glad,” he murmured politely, but with an air of Irish hauteur and coldness, “if anyone wishes it, to drop a short note to the Commonweal.” The secretary scribbled briefly in his book, but the immediate proposals in hand, when the roll call was finished, had shrunk to a single suggestion, which it was within their own power to accomplish; that Mac should get out a pamphlet, with the help of Henry and Preston, outlining Leo’s plan. There was a painful silence. No one, not even Mac himself or Eleanor, had any real confidence in the efficacy of this idea. How many pamphlets, remarked Preston, had not Mac got out in the past, with the sole result, as far as he could see, that the dining room he now stood in contained fifty not-very-charming people. “Perhaps the pamphlet will influence us,” he drily suggested.

  “Why not drop the whole idea?” asked John Aloysius Brown, rather maliciously. “We’re too cut off up here.” Taub, seeing the way the wind was blowing by the noncommittal and evasive faces, promptly withdrew into his shelter. “Better call it off,” he decreed. But the Macdermotts felt immediately offended at the implications of this advice, though it accorded with their own inner weariness as they saw themselves once again confronted with the unwieldy machinery of the world as-it-was-constituted which had worn out their youth and patience as side by side, with so little assistance, they had struggled in vain for leverage. It was as if Leo’s plan, by appearing so deceptively simple and natural, had led them back into the old impasse and abandoned them to their own devices. Yet the suggestion that they were unimportant and powerless, they would not accept from another. “Too small for you, eh, Will?” Mac demanded. But as he looked around him his pugnacity quickly deserted him. He felt old and tired. “Well, of course,” he said sadly, “If nobody wants it . . .”

  Katy and Susan, in unison, cried out vehemently in reprobation. “We do,” they insisted, covered with shame for themselves and for the company at large. Their sudden loss of energy had been the result of a collective awakening from a day-dream. For a short half hour, everything had seemed so easy. People had appeared to them infinitely malleable, simply the instruments of their plan. The Congressman in Susan’s consciousness had had no need of a name; he existed in a vacuum equipped only with a desk, at which to open the letter which he had been conjured up to read. Katy’s college president had been simply a rubbery outline which she could stretch to her measure. And any doubts she had experienced as to her ability to do this in practice had been lulled to rest by her confidence in the influence which would be exerted by others, as though all the public figures and prominent “personalities” would yield compliantly together to the ardent temperature of the meeting, like wax melting in the sun. When the stab of Haines’ defection had pierced this joint assurance, reality had all at once by contrast assumed a character infinitely hard, impermeable, and the Congressman, for example, from being a nothing, a receptacle, became an entity so resistive that to obtain his name from a newspaper became a task that seemed to Susan for the moment a veritable labor of Hercules. But now that the faint-heartedness of the membership had reached really scandalous proportions, their feminine sense of propriety rallied them to indignation. “I thought we were all agreed,” began Katy in her classroom manner, “that Leo’s idea had merit.” She paused for rhetorical effect and when no one contradicted her, continued with a sarcastic precision which she had learned from her old Latin teacher, and which sat like an antique hat on her impetuous and still-girlish delivery. “In that case, we might do it the honor of working for it ourselves.” Here she carefully directed her gaze away from the vicinity of Jim Haines, for whom, as a matter of fact, she was busy constructing excuses, as for some favorite male student who was inexplicably delinquent in his work. To Katy’s mind, Jim Haines figured as the pivotal member of the community; he represented the normal, and the others turned anxiously around him, like the satellites of a sun-king. Though he seemed unaware of this pre-eminence or too-boyishly reticent to take notice of it, the fact was that nearly all the members had set themselves out to please him, not because he had been more successful than themselves in the world down below, but because, with his deteriorating resemblance to an Arrow Collar ad, his moody air of dissipation and long-limbed Lincolnesque melancholy, his shambling gait and diction, he typified the middling sensual man of democratic persuasions to whom the appeal of Utopia was beseechingly addressed. Everyone considered it a miracle that he was here among them, full of domestic habits and the know-how of the ax and the monkey-wrench, the eternal father of the family, busy with small repairs, hospitable with the whisky and soda, large-minded and impatient of women, whom he treated with ceremonious gallantry. And though there was some vague speculation as to what exactly could have persuaded him to make this hegira with them, on the whole it was felt that this was one of those things that it was better not to inquire into too closely, lest analysis “vanish” him from their company, like Cupid under Psyche’s taper. Operation Peace, as first sketched out by him, had seemed an almost incredible bonanza, and the group, when disappointed of it, had done its best not to appear crestfallen and to act as if what had happened had proceeded not from a man’s will or the lack of it but from some irreproachable natural order—it had been really too much to hope for, Katy and Susan had murmurously agreed.

  “It’s silly,” Katy went on, resuming her ordinary demeanor, “to try to in
terest other people in this plan when we’ve done nothing for it ourselves. We have to begin with the pamphlet and reach as many readers as we can. Then . . .” she gestured vaguely, “we will see what can be done. I was just talking to Francis.” The young minister gave a nod of acknowledgment, slightly rising from his seat; he was extremely conscious of his holy orders and showed a great sensitivity to quotation, as if he were an authorized text. “He suggests that perhaps the next step would be to form an organization, something like the old CARE, to bring people here instead of sending them packages.”

  “That is substantially correct,” said Francis, with a short clerical clearing of the throat. “Naturally, we would begin in a very small way. The advantage is that such a practical fund, by enlisting people’s charitable impulses, would expose them to our idea, and also lead them, before very long, to look for a way of financing it at the public expense.” He coughed, and the meeting, after a second of incomprehension, burst into laughter and applause. Francis’ sermonizing voice, nature’s gift, apparently, he played on for profane effects that seemed sometimes almost blasphemous; many a sardonic epigram uncoiled itself guilefully in his periods like the serpent in the garden of innocence. The more naïve Utopians hardly knew what to make of him; they looked to a leader before laughing at his witticisms as the unaccustomed churchgoer awaits the direction of the choir before venturing to rise for the anthem or seat himself for the sermon in his pew. “He tickles me,” confided Taub to his wife, illustrating this remark with a vast delighted wriggle and a poke in the ribs. His amazed admiration had known no bounds from the moment he formed the idea that the decorous young clergyman was an unbeliever of the deepest dye. Had he seen Francis in his room on his knees praying to be forgiven for levity, he would merely have given the young man credit for an artistry more consummate than that which he had already conceded him.

  Francis’s suggestion, now, combining the Machiavellian with the humanitarian, made an immediate appeal to his fancy. He did not think it really practical; he looked in fact upon the man of God’s sense of policy as a kind of hothouse produce of the ecclesiastical atmosphere, too rarefied for this world. Still, he saw no harm in supporting him, provisionally, at any rate. Ever since his break with the Movement, his imagination had been seeking a vision of some tremendous social change, involving the uprooting of millions, on which to disport itself. The irrigation of deserts, the leveling of mountains, the control of rain and snow, heat and humidity, and, above all, the remoulding of the human material itself, the disruption of ancient patterns—such dreams of power and mastery, far more than its fraternal aspect, were what had attracted him to communism, and his disillusionment with the Movement had sprung largely from its concentration on narrowly nationalistic aims and its abandonment of an insurgent ideology. This imagination of his was too graphic for war to fill the bill for it; he groaned as he heard a fancied bomb land and shrank from the jet-projectile. Not since the opening of the Moscow subway had an event of large dimensions moved him to creative identification, and now, increasingly, as he observed the needle of the meeting swing slowly back to Leo, he felt himself more and more attracted by the very grandiosity of the plan. “Stranger things have happened,” he remarked with solemnity to Harold, and his mind, like a great derrick, began moving the peoples of the earth, out of their old folkways and into a new dynamic. “For this we would need atomic energy,” he declared softly, after a few moments of calculation. “It is always so in history. The problem and the solution come at the same time.”

  On this note of tentative willingness the meeting broke up. Joe Lockman, who had absented himself during the final discussion, appeared in the doorway to summon them for a fireworks display, which, through the offices of a novelty wholesaler in Quincy, he had been arranging for the past week. It had grown completely dark. The younger children were roused from their cots in an improvised dormitory; the older children were called from the lounge, where, with that peculiar lack of initiative characteristic of the dawn of life, they had been playing their eternal game of cards—everyone gathered on the lawn or on the deep verandah, which went nearly three-quarters of the way around the hotel and widened, facing the mountains, to form a kind of jutting deck. Into the limitless night the rockets and Roman candles were launched in a magical colored procession of fountains, sprays, constellations, arcs, spirals, lone brilliant stars cutting a great swath through the heavens and dropping uncompanioned into darkness. On the lawn, the huge maples could be seen outlined in the flashes of light, their gnarled, ancient, peaceable shapes assuming a baroque and terrible aspect. Joe, having hastily quitted his post at the urging of Haines and Jackson, was sketching on the verandah with the help of a pair of flashlights held stiffly before him by Susan in the attitude of an acolyte with tapers. Whistler’s Nocturne had inspired him to improve on it; he was attempting to trace the myriad paths of the rockets as though to grasp the secret of movement, but depressed by the slowness of his pencil, he flung it down in despair. The air was cold and damp; some of the youngest children began to whimper; others were admonished by their mothers to pay attention to the show. The display itself began to fizzle out, like the promise of the rockets in the sky. The bursts of stars came more sparsely; the same types began to recur—the novelty wholesaler was only human and the poverty of his resources was soon manifest, particularly to the children, whose criticisms were hastily shushed. That sense of longing for the infinite, of regret, and a certain dispiritedness produced by all mechanical marvels, commenced to be generally felt; half-ashamedly, the colonists were wishing themselves in their warm, protected beds. Yet the last golden-white spray as it spent itself forlornly in the void evoked a sigh of disappointment. “I could have watched that for ever,” they assured Joe as they parted.

  Taub woke up the next morning in a singularly good mood. A strawberry picnic was planned for noon in the high meadow. A holiday had been declared from the fields, and the company was to spend the morning in the woods picking the small wild strawberries, and then converge at twelve on the meadow, where they grew in the greatest abundance, and with the sun-warmed flavor of wine. A prize would be awarded to the person with the fullest basket. The discovery of these little berries had been an event of the richest significance to Taub. He recalled having gathered such berries with his mother in the dark forests of the Carpathians, and his first instinctive reaction had been one of startled unbelief when one of the children had come running into the kitchen, where he was meditatively drying the dishes, with the news that there were strawberries in the woods. “Impossible!” he had exclaimed to Susan, but he had gone out to see for himself, and confronted with the tiny, half-ripe fruit, he had stood agog with the coincidence, turning a berry over and over doubtfully in his big fingers, like a jeweler appraising a diamond. The minuteness of the fruit and its rarity, together with the memory of himself, small and uniquely valued by the guardian presence of his mother, had struck him with awe and reverence. He felt his character soften and an unwonted tenderness invade him, as tactfully and even piously he wrapped the little fruit in his handkerchief to take home and show to his wife. A sense of restored continuity soothed his locative anxiety; Utopia appeared as the sequel to a story begun in his childhood, and the fact, which he slowly ascertained after many surreptitious woodland strolls, that the colony not only had these wild strawberries but had them in a greater plenitude than he had ever known in his homeland topped off nostalgic sentiment with the creamy self-satisfaction of the well-pleased entrepreneur.

  The season being a tardy one, the fruit had reached its peak on this Fourth of July weekend. It had not rained for some days, so that the kitchen garden needed no weeding, and the berries were in perfect condition. In the main kitchen, Katy and Eleanor Macdermott were frying great pans full of chicken, and Nelly Boardman, the illustrator, was preparing a freezer of vanilla ice cream for Haines and the young veteran to crank. Taub and Cynthia, with their basket, set off rather late to the forest, arms interlinked, and leaning s
lightly on one another, with an air of mutual solicitude, like a fond elderly couple who have supported life’s trials together. The strawberries had drawn them closer; for Cynthia, too, they held memories of a lost idyllic period when, during a summer at Fontainebleau as a young lady, she would eat fraises des bois on a Sunday in an upper dining room of Lapérouse and dream of the career ahead of her in the great world of fashion. The Taubs’ disparate reminiscences fructified each other and revived the romance between them—the consciousness of social difference which had attracted them to each other had become somewhat blurred by their years of association. Cynthia was estimating, more for her husband’s pleasure than her own, what a serving of these berries would cost at a fashionable restaurant today (presuming, of course, that one could get them), and Taub’s flat black eyes bulged naïvely at the figures she mentioned; an ejaculation of pain escaped him as if from the region of his pocketbook. Neither husband nor wife was a good picker; they bent arduously from the waist. A sense of their joint dignity would not permit them to squat—and their eyes were too nearsighted to distinguish the round, serrated strawberry leaf from the pointed wild blackberry. Nevertheless, they were content, though the bottom of their basket was barely covered and Taub had begun to think that whatever price could be charged for them would result in a loss to the picker. Halfway through the morning they sat down to rest and idly listened for bird calls, in which Cynthia was instructing her husband. Thus it happened that they heard, quite close to them, the sound of an automobile motor.