Mary McCarthy

by Mary McCarthy

  All these, on the instructorial or assistant-professor level, constituted the bulk of Jocelyn’s faculty, which included many transients and floaters, here one year and gone the next. Behind them, on the associate- or full-professor level, was the staple minority of family men, Fathers of the progressive republic, kindly, genial, older statesmen wedded to pipe and tobacco-pouch, steeped in a beneficent content, rather in the Swiss style, fond of bierstube, lieder, mountain-climbing, ice-skating, aperitifs on the plaza of a well-loved foreign town, chary of commitment, generous of praise, prudent, thrifty, foresighted—the best type, in short, of bourgeois summer-wandering scholar who saw events, as it were, three-dimensional, through the broadening stereopticon of travel. Such men had been drawn into the progressive life more or less by accident, through a chance recommendation, a meeting on a promenade deck, a college friendship kept up, and stayed in it partly from habit and partly from that taste for a foreign yet familiar environment that governed their vacation schedules: the scandals and oddities of the successive years at Jocelyn were preserved in their reminiscences like views of the Bay of Naples or, more appropriately, like the graffiti at Pompeii. Unlike their younger colleagues, they were able to find extenuating circumstances for any piece of rascality; seasoning had made them tolerant. Like all long-time residents in an alien environment, they used a double standard, one for themselves and another, more lenient, for the native folkways.

  Such a man was Aristide Poncy, professor of French and German, head of the Languages department of the Literature and Languages Division, a Swiss in actual derivation as well as in temperament, brought to America by his parents when he was six years old, educated at Zurich and the University of North Dakota—a middle-aged, fatherly man with large, smooth chaps and an outing taste in dress that suggested Sherlock Holmes. He had been at Jocelyn from the beginning without making an enemy; he taught his pupils, by preference, out of secondary-school textbooks and was himself engaged in a lifelong study of Amiel, on whom he had already published an admirable bibliography and two pertinent articles. None of his students, alas, could be got to share this interest; they preferred to read Sartre and Camus or, rather, to hear about them—he himself had lost patience with the French novel about the time of Maurice Dekobra. Under his multilingual auspices a variety of rather curious younger people had come to teach at Jocelyn. He had perhaps a cantonal prejudice (unconscious) against the French of Paris or even that of Marseilles, so that he had introduced into his division a veritable babel of accents. As assistants and colleagues in French, he had had at various times a Belgian, a German, a Corsican, another Swiss, an Egyptian (who, as he confided to Mrs. Fortune, spoke French “like a native”); this year, under him, were Domna Rejnev, a Russian, and a half-American Turk whom he had met in Istanbul, a Mr. Mahmoud Ali Jones, a tall, stiff, bearded man with a queer rigid gait who resembled a flat Christ in a primitive, under Byzantine influence, and who was thought by some, for this reason, to be an international criminal. Aristide’s taste for colonial or, as it were, secondary sources of a language extended also to German, which was taught by himself and an Austrian, and to Spanish, by a girl from Peru.

  The fact was, Aristide Poncy was a good and innocent man—the father of three little Poncys who all took piano-lessons—whose shrewdness and knowledge of the world applied only to money-matters at home and to the exchange of currency in foreign countries. He had been guilty, as he once confessed to Domna in an undertone, “of many grave mistakes in the judgment of character.” Whenever, during the summer, he took a party of students abroad under his genial wing, catastrophic events attended him. As he sat sipping his vermouth and introducing himself to tourists at the Flore or the Deux Magots, the boys and girls under his guidance were being robbed, eloping to Italy, losing their passports, slipping off to Monte Carlo, seeking out an abortionist, deciding to turn queer, cabling the decision to their parents, while he took out his watch and wondered why they were late in meeting him for the expedition to Saint-Germain-en-Laye. Returning home, usually minus one student at the very least, he always deprecated what had happened, remarking that there had been “a little mix-up” or that the Métro was confusing to foreigners.

  Was it, Domna Rejnev wondered, as she rapped sharply on the door of his office, this fatal gullibility that had drawn her to him now to unfold Mulcahy’s story, or was it rather his fatherly qualities, his tolerance, experience, and human kindness that made her fear him less at such a moment than she would have feared Howard Furness or Alma Fortune, both friends of the Mulcahys, where Aristide was not? Already, as she hurried through the building, she had begun to have the feeling that the tale she bore was incredible (which, of course, her training reassured her, did not make it any the less true), and she had commenced to rehearse in her own mind, her lips moving swiftly as she climbed the narrow stairs, certain little modifications and additions that would make the President’s guilt more evident to an a-political audience. For there was no doubt that, of all persons she could have chosen, Aristide Poncy was the least qualified to appreciate the nuances of the affair, so that even as she knocked, she hesitated, hearing her superior trill out, “Entrez,” with a wonderful, exhibition r that made her see already his large pink tongue soloing against his red mouth-roof and his large clean white teeth (Aristide spoke French virtuoso-style, like a demonstrator in a department store or a professional diver in slow motion, holding his mouth open to illustrate the mechanics of the production of the various dentals and alveolars). He rose from his desk to welcome her, a busy, energetic man as his office showed, book-lined from floor to ceiling, with a special section for magazines, French, Swiss, and German, and for journals of the trade, yet he was evidently, as he said, très content to see her, eager to show her a new volume on M. de Vogüé which he had just procured from his bookseller with the idea that it might interest her, très content, and, as always, full of restrained anticipation for the good gossip that would follow.

  Domna, shown to a chair, assuring him that his pipe did not bother her, felt at the same time a reluctance to begin on her narrative and a queer conviction that with this eager listener she had an absolutely free hand; owing to his personal security and remoteness from political conspiracy, he would accept whatever she told him as an attested marvel. “You don’t say?” he would interject from time to time and sit back to be regaled with the details. This prediction, she remarked to herself parenthetically, while clearing her throat to commence, would hold good for the greater part of the Jocelyn faculty—with two or three exceptions, they would believe anything you told them touching political entanglements. And with this a terrible temptation came to her, who was a model of honesty: why not involve Maynard Hoar? As even Aristide knew, Jocelyn’s “liberal” spokesman had tuned his guitar more than once to the Russian balalaika and was far more guilty, really, than the misled and hapless Mulcahy, who had not known how to disengage himself from an embarrassing commitment. Why not say that Henry, just now, in confessing his Party membership had also implicated Maynard in the Party tie? Easy to assert, in confidence, and no more, in a sense, than the truth. As soon as this devilish idea reached her full consciousness, she expelled it as wicked and useless—it could only end in ineffectuality or in both men’s losing their jobs. Yet the fact that it could have proposed itself to her so readily, easily, and naturally gave her a disturbing shock. What had happened to make her so ready to embark on a course of opportunistic lying? Are we less scrupulous when we plead for others than when we work for ourselves? And how in the course of a few minutes had she come to hate Maynard to the point where she would see him ruined, gladly, and think it a just desert? These questions remained troublingly in her mind, as she began to relate to Aristide, as truthfully as possible, and yet with great anger and conviction, the story of Henry’s dismissal. “You don’t say!” he presently ejaculated. “Incroyable!”

  CHAPTER V

  In Camera

  AT ONE O’CLOCK in Mr. Poncy’s office, Domna was tensely
retelling the story to a group which now consisted of Mr. Poncy himself, Mrs. Fortune, young Mr. Bentkoop of Comparative Religion, Mr. Kantorowitz of Art, Mr. Van Tour, who had put his round head in, crying, “Here you all are!” and Mrs. Legendre of the Theatre. Sympathy and shock were instant; a sense of vicarious outrage—the vocational endowment of all educators—fused them like a Greek chorus behind their colleague as protagonist; strophic interjections of pity and disgust broke into the narrative before it was halfway finished. Even Mr. Poncy, who had thought to hold aloof from the affair, found himself with a capital stake in it by sheer virtue of seniority; as the first to have heard the story, he automatically assumed charge of it and kept interrupting Domna to underscore a point or add a detail which had made a strong impression on his own imagination, and very often, in doing so, he slightly altered the original, which in turn had been colored by Domna with the dye of her own temperament. Thus, in the telling and the response, the story became a living thing—the joint possession of the group—and was to some extent already alienated from its hero, of whom everyone agreed that, whatever was to be done (and on this there was great disagreement), he must be kept in the background, lest he do damage to his own case as they saw fit to administer it. In short, as usually happens in such affairs, the Mulcahy cause was immediately expropriated from its owner and taken over by a group which viewed it somewhat in the light of a property or a trust to be handled by an inner circle in accordance with its own best judgment; the element of secrecy enhanced this proprietary illusion; by common consent, lines were drawn between those who could be trusted and those who could not, between those in the office and those outside. And even within the office, certain discriminations began to be felt; Aristide in a low voice was emphasizing to Alma Fortune a departmental aspect of the case too little, he felt, taken into consideration by Domna, while Kantorowitz and Bentkoop, in the window-seat, exchanged a series of cryptic signs and voiceless words, indicating that Van Tour ought never to have been admitted to the conclave, and Ivy Legendre, whose empty stomach had set up its own growl, lazily urged Domna to call the meeting to order.

  Everyone, that is, felt called upon to stipulate, like a lawyer, his own degree of interest in the case, and to distinguish his own area of human solidarity from that of his neighbor, carefully set up boundaries and limits, eminent domain. To Aristide, it was the manner of the dismissal, the irregularity of it, that was unsettling, while Alma felt for Catherine and the children, Kantorowitz for the Humanities, Bentkoop for theism, Ivy for all rebels and bohemians, irrespectively; only poor Van Tour appreciated the politics of the case, having once in his early struggles as a regionalist short-story writer and would-be contributor to Anvil joined the League of American Writers and the League for Peace and Democracy, in the same spirit, as he now protested, that a small-town doctor, hanging out his shingle, joined the Rotary or Kiwanis or roared every Tuesday with the Lions. For everyone but the plaintive Van Tour, in fact, Mulcahy’s confessed Communist past and the President’s right to fire him for it became immediately subordinated to some collateral issue; thus Bentkoop, on the strength of a number of conversations about grace and theological despair which he had enjoyed with Mulcahy was impelled to state, categorically, speaking as a neo-Protestant, that his support for Mulcahy rested, very simply, on his belief that it was important to have at least one theist in the Literature department.

  On any other occasion, this avowal would have provoked a clamor, since it laid bare a view of education-as-indoctrination that was as shocking to the liberals and pluralists present as would have been the sight of an imported serpent rearing up on Aristide’s Coptic rug. But this morning such a response was held in abeyance, as it were, for the duration of Henry’s emergency; the notion, in fact, of a working alliance with God produced an agreeable sensation of jesuitry in everyone, as though it were a pact with the dark Plutonic powers. They felt heartened and stimulated by the very novelty of it and by a sense of mysterious big battalions moving up to support them from the rear. What impressed them about Henry’s case, as presented by Domna, was precisely the mixture of the commonplace and the bizarre. On the one hand, there was the family man and fellow-teacher; on the other, the arcanum of Communism, which excited their curiosity and at the same time relieved it. They saw themselves plunged into the adventurous and already looked on their colleagues, who were not to be made privy to this secret, as so many insensitive pharisees, incapable of understanding the motives that could have influenced a high-strung, conscientious individual to immolate himself in the mass. And the fact was, of course, that they did not understand it either, but forebore from asking embarrassing questions out of shame and a kind of shyness in the presence of the equivocal. Like so many gingerly Thomases, they contented themselves with fingering the wounds held out to them and attesting their intellectual superiority by their readiness to believe the incredible. When Van Tour cried out, for the third time, in his wailing, womanish voice. “What I don’t see, Domna, is why doesn’t he come right out and confess it,” everyone sighed aloud, and Aristide got up and, leading him into a corner, took him over by rote the whole history of the case, of Senator McCarthy, the Hiss trial, the crisis of liberalism in American universities, though in reality Van Tour’s question had more than once visited his own mind.

  Meanwhile, in the faculty dining-room, Howard Furness, head of the Literature department, who had had an appointment with Alma Fortune at twelve forty-five sharp to discuss a certain student who was coming up for Sophomore Orals, was glancing at his Cartier wrist-watch, a gift from one of last year’s parents, and straightening his knitted tie from sheer uneasiness. His sharp, dapper mind was extremely sensitive to any disarray in the outer garment of reality, and the empty places at table wounded him, like missing buttons on a coat. He had been quick, in fact, to see that those who were absent belonged to his chosen circle; something was up, he perceived, from which he was being excluded—a judgment was being passed on him. He was not so stupid, however, as to think, after the first bad moment, that they had met to discuss him directly; rather, he scented a crisis, having learned to detect a crisis by the fact that people avoided him during its early stages. Deeply mistrustful himself, he had learned to know that he was mistrusted and could not think why; the longing for intimacy he felt seemed to him a plain guaranty of the openness and simplicity of his character; it did not occur to him that he was gregarious out of suspicion.

  When the vegetable soup had been removed and the napkins still lay rolled in their napkin rings before the empty places, he slipped out into the hall to telephone, pausing to glance at himself in the men’s room mirror, where he saw only bright delft-blue eyes, flat, rather wooden features with a certain set of resolve to the jaw, and a Bermuda Christmas tan that gave a “finish” to the whole, like a wax stain on floorboards. This simulacrum reassured him; he caulked his face for the inquiry. “Give me the Co-op,” he murmured, legato, to Switchboard, with a sliding determination in his voice. The store phone was finally answered by Mrs. Tryk, the Co-op or soda-shop manageress, who shouted into it as usual in a surly, contumelious tone. “This is Mr. Furness,” he said lightly. “I had an appointment with Mrs. Fortune. I wondered if she could have mistaken it and be waiting for me in the store.” “Not here now,” called Mrs. Tryk. Howard sent his smile over the wire. “Would you mind looking around for me and seeing if any of the other people from my department are there? Or Mr. Bentkoop or Mrs. Legendre? They might be able to tell me where she is.” “Nobody here but Fraenkel of History and Mulcahy. Do you want to talk to them?” Having obtained this much information, Furness lifted an eyebrow—so Mulcahy, who regularly went home to lunch, was eating in the Co-op! But where, in that case, were the others? He felt this violation of the established pattern to be an offense first against himself and second against common decency. “Don’t trouble to get Dr. Mulcahy to the phone,” he said hastily. “Just ask him if he has seen Mrs. Fortune.” He added this latter merely for form’s sake; he felt a
sudden unwillingness to know where any of them were.

  “Hello, Howard.” Mulcahy’s rather ectoplasmic voice effused itself into Furness’ ear. Both men disliked each other intensely, under cover of departmental solidarity and a joint sponsorship of the same canon of authors. The Proust-Joyce-Mann course, in which they alternated from year to year, had been a buffer between them, Furness making it a point to stress Proust by innuendo over Joyce, for whom he felt no great sympathy, and Mulcahy vice versa. “Alma’s not here. Can I help you?” Furness, who combined crudeness with the sensitivity of the princess of the pea—in short, a raw man, well polished, a bright, country-green apple—distinctly heard an ooze of satisfaction percolate through the voice of his subordinate. Wherever she is, he knows, he said to himself with bitterness. The vindictive thought that this egregious fellow might at long last have been fired had more than once darted through his mind, yet the voice on the other end of the wire sounded more as if it had received a promotion. “No thanks, Hen,” he said shortly and moved to put up the receiver; the line, however, remained open—Henry was waiting, like an encouragement. “Are you through?” inquired the operator. “You haven’t seen Domna, have you, or Ivy?” Furness burst out, thickly, despite himself. His tone suddenly grew querulous, as when he had been drinking, and a wild feeling of loneliness drove him to abase himself. “Where is everybody, anyway? What’s up?” “Perhaps they’ve gone to Gus’s for a drink,” suggested Henry, too helpful. “Probably,” assented Furness, hanging up.