Mary McCarthy

by Mary McCarthy

  “You told Esther,” she suggested, in her low, consolatory voice. This divination of his conduct rather startled him; he had intended to take her by surprise. “About Cathy’s condition? Yes,” he acknowledged. “It was a question of paying the movers to get the furniture out of storage. My mother-in-law, who could pay, was understandably against the move. I didn’t know where else to turn. It appeared to me that Esther, if she knew how serious things were with Cathy, how necessary security was for her, might stir Maynard up to give me a letter, something on paper, you know, to show the old lady. In fact,” he admitted apologetically, “I’d already wired Cathy that such a letter was in existence.”

  Domna turned white. “Oh, no, Henry!” she protested, as if to deter him from continuing with a tale that harrowed him too much. “Wait!” He raised a finger and moved a little nearer to her. He experienced a strange, confident exhilaration in forcing her to know him at his worst. “Exactly fourteen hours after I spoke to Esther, Maynard called me to his office.” He paused. Domna caught her breath. “To assure me that the ultimate decision rested with my own conscience. The college would exercise no pressure.” He spread his freckled hands expressively. “By that time, the van was crossing the Alleghenies.”

  Domna’s whole body stiffened, while Henry watched her curiously. This, he was aware, was the real crisis in her loyalty; yet he felt no impulse to press her, but rather a pleasure in waiting while she worked out her own course. She was too intelligent not to see that Hoar had put himself in the clear, that there was not the shadow of a claim on him, technically speaking: his hands were as clean as Pilate’s, ceremonially laved on his balcony; his wife doubtless had had a dream and sent to him, saying, “Have nothing to do, Maynard, with this just man.” Yet did not this precisely make the point? Would Domna be wise enough to know that this very avoidance of a claim on him was in Maynard the measure of an atrocious guilt, a refusal of responsibility, of jointness in the Mystic Body (“We are members, one of another”)?

  Domna’s rose-colored lips curled. “Monster,” she spat out calmly. “Monsters, both of them. Do they think then that that absolves them?” She made a rather theatrical gesture of drawing her skirt aside. Henry was filled with amazement. He felt himself catching fire, quite impersonally, from her, as if his own paler responses blushed beside this defiance. What marvelous contempt, he inwardly exclaimed, and puckered his own lip sourly in imitation of this sublime disdain. “Still, Domna,” he expostulated, in an aggrieved and somewhat whining tone. “Maynard can plausibly contend that he has no responsibility for Cathy, in fact that he tried to deter me from making an imprudent commitment. We mustn’t commit the error of putting Cathy’s health too much in the foreground of the case.” Domna, as he had feared, seemed to be genuinely astonished. “Why not?” she cried. “What else could be in the foreground?” Her dark brows arched in vivid semicircles as she swung around to face him. As always in moments of excitement, her accent became more marked. “What is complicated here?” she protested. “It is all very simple. One does not undertake actions that will lead to the death of other people, short of war at any rate. Does Maynard Hoar accept himself as a murderer? Will you accept him so?” Her strange, intent eyes were shining; she tossed her head angrily and the dark, clean hair bobbed; she clicked her pocket-lighter and drew in on a cigarette. “This cannot be permitted to happen,” she declared quickly, amid puffs of smoke. “One simply refuses it and tells Maynard Hoar so.” She jumped up, knocking a book off the desk, and seized her polo coat from the coatrack. “I shall do it myself at once to set an example.”

  Henry moistened his lips, half tempted by this rashness. “You forget that it must be kept from Cathy,” he said peevishly. “If you go to Maynard in this mood, the whole campus will hear of it.” Domna stood holding her coat. “Come,” he said, “sit down. Do you think that you will convince Maynard by moral arguments when he has already come to this decision fully knowing of Cathy’s condition? Let me tell you something more. In the desk at home, there is a forged letter purporting to be from Maynard, promising me a permanent appointment. Cathy believes in that letter. Do you see now that we must be quiet?” Domna slowly put her coat back and leaned against the desk, lacing and unlacing her fingers. “What’s to be done then?” she asked in a toneless voice. “What’s to become of you, Henry?” Her eyes, wide and frightened, ransacked him as though seeking his destiny. He shrugged. This new admission, he saw with relief and a certain misanthropy, had put her altogether in his hands; his malfeasance would make her submit to his better judgment as to ways and means, as she would submit to the superior knowledge of a criminal whom she was concealing in her house. At bottom, he reminded himself, she was conventional, believing in a conventional moral order and shocked by deviations from it into a sense of helpless guilt toward the deviator. In other words, she was a true liberal, as he had always suspected, who could not tolerate in her well-modulated heart that others should be wickeder than she, any more than she could bear that she should be richer, better born, better looking than some statistical median.

  And now, lo and behold, she was proceeding to give him a perfect example of these mental processes, even when one would have thought that her eyes would have been opened to a darker truth about human nature than her philosophy admitted. “Henry,” she began, frowning, “is it possible, do you suppose that Cathy, unknown to you, has talked about this contract among the faculty wives?” “Cathy doesn’t see the faculty wives,” he answered with impatience. “In the nursery school? In the grocery store?” She pushed her feminine point home with typically feminine insistence. “Supposing she did mention it?” she persisted. “It would be a perfectly natural and harmless thing to do, if one were talking about next year or plans for the children. Yet mention of a two-year contract could give rise to all sorts of jealousies and resentments, even on the upper levels. Suppose then some husband carried the story to Maynard and demanded to know whether it was true or not? Can’t you then imagine Maynard’s getting very angry and giving you notice straight off, simply to show you who was master, who wrote the contracts at Jocelyn?” She had moved along the desk till she was close to him and could look up softly into his face, like a pleading sweetheart urging her boy to reform—with no idea that she had offended him and was offending him more with every irrelevant word she uttered. “I don’t mean to exculpate Maynard, but if this should be so, it at least makes him understandable. Perhaps, if I were to talk to him, he would tell me and I could explain it to him . . . ?” She stole another glance into his face and broke off, suddenly irresolute.

  Without answering, he strode over to the window and looked out at a truck which was unloading some crates onto the platform of the maintenance building on which Domna’s office faced. The blank brick walls of the maintenance building, the smoking chimneys of the incinerator, the heavy truck with its indubitably dubious cargo—how many crates short was this order, what was the kickback today?—all perfectly suited his humor. He and Domna were getting nowhere; she refused to see, as if it were deliberately, the real dynamite in the case.

  “Domna,” he said wearily, turning around from the window. “Can’t you see that what you are suggesting means dismissal for cause, blacklisting? Have you ever read the morals clause in the code on faculty tenure? You mustn’t ever mention this letter or even think of it again, even if you should come to hate me like the others. As for Cathy, she has been told that the letter is not to be spoken of—for the very reasons you cite. Perhaps, even, she knows me well enough to have half guessed the truth behind it—and to keep her guess to herself, a lesson to all wives.” He paced in silence for a moment, with a musing, deliberative air. “What you’re after, of course, is motive. Hoar’s motive, naturally—how has he been tempted to do this, knowing Cathy’s condition? I can enlighten you if you want, at the cost of losing your sympathy.” He stood smiling down at the girl, who had dropped without a word into her swivel-chair; nothing moved in her but her eyes, which looked up at him,
mesmerized with instinctive fear, like an animal’s. “But first let me hint this, Domna—you are somewhat too bornée in your thinking. There is something in you, perhaps an upper-class habit, that keeps you, with your excellent mind and remarkable analytic powers, from making what one might define as the necessary metaphysical leap, the two plus two making five that Dostoievsky speaks of.” The girl nodded, almost joyously; she understood what he meant. “For example,” he proceeded, in a style that was purposefully leisured, “your very search for motive lacks creative imagination. You are looking in private places, while the answer is staring you in the face, from the newspapers, the radio, the forum. Domna, we are at war, though apparently you only realize it when you are reading your morning newspaper. You imagine that the war is located in the dispatches of correspondents, but it is also here, on this campus.”

  The girl’s eyes flew wide open; did she begin at last to see what he was driving at? How much, he asked himself, was it necessary to tell her to send the point home irrefutably? “But leave that for the moment. Let us return to your thinking. As an intellectual exercise, the broad jump we’ve been speaking of, try putting the question that is bothering you in the form of a declarative statement: ‘Knowing of Cathy’s condition, Hoar has been tempted to do this.’ ”

  Domna caught her breath. He moved closer to her and slipped into the chair by her side, feeling a curious, reckless excitement as his full intention became clear to him. He picked up the hem of her smock and played with it in his fingers, rubbing the grain of the raw silk against the whorls of his flesh. Then he began to speak very rapidly. “There’s another aspect of the case that I ought to have told you about. Something you may have guessed or may not have. You may not want any part of me when you hear the truth.” He could see her pointed breasts rise and fall with her quickened breathing; she moved slightly away from him, but he maintained his hold on her smock. “Does your Russian second sight tell you?” he murmured. She shook her head stubbornly, and the dark, shining hair, as usual, fell into her eyes. “Well, then,” he declared, squaring his stooped shoulders, “I must tell you that I am and have been for ten years a member of the Communist Party.”

  A low cry escaped her. “You!” she protested, and when he nodded gravely she burst out, all a-frenzied. “I can’t believe it. I shan’t believe it. I refuse. It’s not like you. You are not political. You are a-political, the last man I have known of whom this could be true.” Henry sat smiling through this tantrum. “You think, then, that Maynard is right to fire me?” he inquired in a satiny voice. Domna recovered herself. “No,” she said slowly, “no.” She straightened herself thoughtfully and brushed the lock of hair back from her eyes. “No,” she reiterated yet another time. “I will stand by what I have always said. No one should be fired for mere belief; indoctrination is another matter.” She had the air of reciting a lesson to firm it mechanically in her memory, and her gaze distantly rested on him as though to firm him in it too. “But I cannot feel the same to you,” she appended in a formal tone. “Am I another man, then, than I was five minutes ago?” “Yes,” she promptly answered. “You have lied to me and to everyone.” Henry tugged a little on the smock, as if to recall his need to her; her downrightness had impressed him very favorably. He coughed.

  “Once again you are too hasty, my dear. I would not have confessed to you if I were not at this moment an archenemy of the Party, one of those unfortunate prisoners of the Party you have read about in your newspaper who lack the courage to break, who live in fear of denunciation by some comrade who suspects us of backsliding, who are forced to perjure themselves on the witness-stand or see their families starve. Fifteen years ago, in a momentary enthusiasm, I joined the Party and since then I’ve had no rest, no respite, no night’s unbroken sleep; I’ve been fired from five universities on various academic pretexts, never knowing who was responsible, the jealous head of the department, a student I’ve awarded an E to, or a comrade teacher to whom I’d spoken too frankly my real opinion of the Party.

  “Looking back on it now, I see that I might have gotten out quietly during the Yalta period, as many others did, but I feared exposure too much, teaching in a conservative college with a Catholic president and dean. Had I broken at that time, I could not know that I would not be expelled and my name printed in the Daily Worker; this actually happened to many teachers in my unit. At any rate, I was afraid. Very possibly, I am a coward. In any event, once I had lied to my superiors as to my affiliations—under orders, of course, but also for my own skin—I was done for, the Party had me. I have been useful to them from time to time in various little undercover jobs, and they content themselves with merely terrorizing me in the interests of some future big job, if they are driven underground, say, and they need a respectable front or merely a letter-drop.” His lips tightened in a short, bitter smile. “So, Domnatchka, you see, I have taken refuge in my irony, in the peculiarity of my position, a Communist in name only, like a wife of the same brand, allowed to go my own way, so long as I keep up the observances and pay my protection-money to the Bridges Defense Committee, the Committee for the Hollywood Ten (there but for the grace of God), the Trenton Six, and so forth. A unique life in No Man’s Land, a target for both sides.” Domna impulsively took his hand. “But you are not a Communist,” she reassured him. “It is all very simple. You have only to get up and say so, here in a progressive college, and we will all protect you.”

  Henry shook his head. “Too late,” he insisted. “Too late for anyone to break today who will not play the role of stool-pigeon or police-informer. You forget that I have perjured myself before my superiors and before a state legislature—an indictable offense. No one will protect us exes in America unless we also become antis, unless we are willing to wear the shoes of a Budenz or a Miss Bentley and denounce former comrades, many of whom, my dear, are very likely in my own position. No, thank you, Domna.” He rose from his chair and stretched himself. “Ite missa est, or in Church Slavonic, get out, Mulcahy, you’re finished.” Domna took a swift breath and put out a hand to detain him. “You feel certain that Maynard knows?” she said with a troubled face. “You feel sure that that is the reason?” “What else?” he remarked lightly. “As is common knowledge on the campus, two gentlemen from the F.B.I. paid a call to Jocelyn last week. A purely social visit, you think?” Wheeling suddenly, he approached the desk with a complete change of mien. “You see it all now, don’t you?” he demanded in a breathy, sibilant voice. “The heat is on Maynard to get rid of me. I have become a political liability, and he will use any pretext to get rid of me before my name appears in a congressional investigation. And I myself—what a superb irony—have furnished him with just the lever he needs to slide me out quietly, without controversy—Cathy’s heart condition. Very considerately, he notifies me well in advance of the termination of my contract, smoothly bypasses the department, and leaves it up to me to find other employment before I dare tell Cathy that we’re moving on to pastures new.” In the mounting excitement of the last words, he felt his head exultantly whirling; speed and the impediment of his lisp made him salivate copiously as he spoke. “What would you think now,” he brought out, “if I put it to you: ‘knowing of Cathy’s condition, Hoar has been tempted to do this’?” Domna slowly raised her eyes. “I would think as you do,” she acceded in a low, unwilling voice.

  She rose from her desk summarily and tore a slip of paper from her memo pad, on which from time to time during the last five minutes she had been scribbling a list of some kind which his eyes had been mistrustfully glancing toward without being able to read. Now, with bated breath, he watched her take off the smock and put on her coat; she looked very smart, trim, and handsome, and he scarcely dared ask her what she was planning to do. “You’re going to see Maynard?” he finally ventured. Domna shook her head. “Too early for that. As you say, this is not a private matter. Maynard must be faced with it in the open, insofar as we can do that and protect you and Cathy at the same time. You don’t m
ind, do you, if I date your last active membership back a few years, say, before you were investigated by the legislature?” “Whatever you think best,” he acquiesced gratefully; their roles, he perceived, had changed again, and it was better so for the moment. “But what?” he nevertheless queried, in some real mystification. She flashed the list before his eyes, rather gaily, and he was able to read on it the names of six colleagues, with notes and questions opposite each, written in violet ink in her large European hand.

  “Your sympathizers,” she tersely remarked.

  CHAPTER IV

  Ancient History

  JOCELYN COLLEGE, on this mid-morning in January, as Henry Mulcahy trod softly through its corridors, had a faculty of forty-one persons and a student-body of two hundred and eighty-three—a ratio of one teacher to every 6.9 students, which made possible the practice of “individual instruction” as carried on at Bennington (6:1), Sarah Lawrence (6.4:1), Bard (6.9:1), and St. John’s (7.7:1). It had been founded in the late Thirties by an experimental educator and lecturer, backed by a group of society-women in Cleveland, Pittsburgh, and Cincinnati who wished to strike a middle course between the existing extremes, between Aquinas and Dewey, the modern dance and the labor movement. Its students were neither to till the soil as at Antioch nor weave on looms as at Black Mountain; they were to be grounded neither in the grass-roots present as at Sarah Lawrence nor in the great-books past as at St. John’s or Chicago; they were to specialize neither in verse-writing, nor in the poetic theatre, nor in the techniques of co-operative living—they were simply to be free, spontaneous, and coeducational.