Mary McCarthy

by Mary McCarthy

  “Ah,” exclaimed Maynard, “you’ve read them. What do you think? Are you satisfied?” He smiled on them with disconcerting friendliness as they confessed that the evidence did indeed bear out what he said. In fact, to their dismay he seemed disposed to treat of the whole affair as past and forgotten, a mere slip of judgment on their part which he gladly extenuated. “Don’t think,” he said, “that I bear Hen any grudge for this. I don’t, in all honesty, and I don’t want to see you two blame him. He needs every friend he has. What’s passed between us this morning will stay right in this office. I’ll do anything I can to help him find another place.” The two looked awkwardly at each other; the President’s manifest sincerity and even kindliness made the next step difficult.

  “Maynard,” brought out John, after a short silence, “has it occurred to you that the termination of Hen’s appointment will be a sort of vindication for the critics of your stand on the rights of the dissident to teach?” A flicker of uneasiness appeared in the President’s eyes; he shifted in his seat and said nothing. “When you hired him,” John continued, “it wasn’t from motives of utility, as you say yourself in these letters. You hired him to make a profession of faith, not in Hen as a teacher of English, but in the principle of freedom of conscience. You asserted that neither the state nor a mere concert of opinion professing to uphold the state had the right of search and entry into the privileged domain of the soul.” Maynard made a sign of assent that carried with it a certain impatience. “What you proclaimed to the world was not your perspicacity as a judge of English teachers, which you compared favorably to the perspicacity of a group of ignorant politicians, but your duty not to inquire into the private beliefs of a teacher, whatever they might be. If you let him out now, for motives of utility, you’ll supply a sorry footnote to a courageous action. You won’t persuade anybody that he was let go for budgetary reasons. It will be assumed, as a matter of course, that you had your eyes opened, got your fingers burned, learned a thing or two, tasted your own medicine—all the ugly phrases coined by the demon in us to describe the deceit and disappointment of the spiritual by the material factor.”

  “Deceit and disappointment,” echoed Maynard. “I’m a tired man, John. The material factor is a mite bulkier than I supposed when I was your age. I’m afraid I must heed the bursar’s realities here, as I did on the Jewish quota. Fifty per cent.” He ruminated. “It’s a high quota, I console myself. The usual half a loaf. I sometimes pretend to myself that what we have is a Gentile quota.” He smiled a fleeting smile of self-disparagement. “In Hen’s case, I’ve done what I could, within the limits of necessity; more than most would do.” He looked at his watch. “Let my critics crow. I won’t deny that as a man I’ve found Hen a bit of a disappointment; like all martyrs, when you get to know them, he turns out to have quite a chip on his shoulder. But I accept that. I make allowances for it. After all, we all know that old Hen is no Communist; nobody in his right mind would think so but some fool state senator—when I watch him, I say to myself, ‘Was ever man more unjustly treated?’ ” He laughed and a strange look passed between John and Domna, which Maynard appeared to sense, like a shadow or a draught of cold air. “At any rate,” he continued, “we can give him a clean bill of health here as to political activity; why, I don’t even believe he’s signed up for Blue Cross.”

  “Dr. Hoar—” said Domna quickly, and hesitated. If he genuinely did not know, as it almost seemed, her revelation might harm Henry. But how was it possible that he did not know, if not from the F.B.I., then from Furness, the incorrigible gossip? “You’re thinking of the loyalty oaths?” he half-asserted. She nodded. “Ah, don’t tell me,” sighed Maynard. “I’ve considered that angle myself. I’ve said to myself that Hen, as we all know, is just the fellow to refuse to sign a loyalty oath out of sheer principled cussedness; I respect him for it. And yet, as we all know too, Hen really belongs in one of the traditional colleges, where they’re asking more and more for an oath or some sort of signed statement to the effect that the applicant is not a member of any subversive organizations. You know where I stand on that. I’ve asked myself whether I had the right to send him out of here to face that decision. But I’ve established to my own satisfaction that in Hen’s case we have an unusual situation, where he’s been smeared in the past, and so would be justified in signing such a thing to clear himself, and for family reasons; nobody would blame him for it—in fact, I’d say, go to it. I don’t ordinarily agree with the position which says that if you’re not a Communist, why not say so and show some consideration for your family; but in this special case I think it has relevance.” As he dealt with this curious scruple, his manner became more tranquil, as though, contemptuously thought Domna, the capacity to entertain such a small scruple testified to his largeness of mind. “Hen,” he continued, “has the training and ability to make good in one of our big universities: let him do it then; I won’t condemn him if he makes his peace with society.” The two young people, by common consent, avoided looking at each other. Maynard suddenly coughed. There was a silence.

  “So, Dr. Hoar, you scruple about the loyalty oath?” asked Domna, in a suffocated tone, her nostrils quivering. “But you will turn him out without a qualm despite what we tell you about Cathy?” Whatever she had promised Alma, she knew that in another moment she was going to resign; the interview had reached its crisis. She half-rose from her chair, but the President waved her back. All at once, he temporized, looking into the two taut faces. “Why not wait and see?” he suggested. “Let him try and find another post and if nothing turns up for him by June, say, or mid-summer, we will try what we can do with the bursar. In the long run, I don’t suppose, Domna, that we’ll literally turn him out into the streets. But let him make an effort, I say, and show me that he means business.”

  “Impossible,” she retorted. “How do you imagine that a man of Henry’s temperament will stand such a strain? He can keep a secret from his wife for a week, ten days, two weeks; but how will she not learn of it if he is looking for other work?” The scorn she felt for his callousness made her fearless of offending him; in her own mind, she had already resigned and spoke to him brusquely as an equal. “Whoa,” cried the President, genially. “Let me get this straight. You mean to tell me that Hen hasn’t told her yet? That defies all the laws of matrimony.” “Naturally, he has not told her,” replied Domna. “If he had, she might be dead at this moment.” The President’s face wore a look that vacillated between amusement and curiosity. “You take this very hard, Domna,” he said, wonderingly. “I scarcely think Cathy’s heart condition can warrant such drastic attitudes. I myself have a slight heart condition,” he warned her with mock severity. “Shall I complain that at this moment you’re endangering my life?”

  “You mean you don’t believe it,” she asserted. “Oh, I believe it,” conceded the President. “Hen would scarcely make such a statement without some medical backing. I doubt whether it’s as serious as he thinks. What you can’t understand, Domna, is that most of us, after a certain age, are living on borrowed time. The doctor has told Hen, in all probability, to spare Cathy any unnecessary shocks. My doctor has told me to avoid worry.” Domna coquetted. “If you say yes to us, Dr. Hoar, you will have no more worry.” She gave him a dazzling smile.

  “That’s an idea,” he said, jesting. “Let me think it over.” He turned to John. “You back Domna up, do you?” John nodded. “Why?” asked the President, as confronted with a real mystery. “You have a level head on your shoulders. What I’d like to hear from you is one positive concrete reason for keeping Hen—what Jocelyn would gain by it; never mind what Hen would gain by it, or humanity, or the liberal tradition. I don’t hear anything from either of you about Hen’s qualities as a teacher—what do the students think of him?” “They admire him,” put in Domna, passionately, knowing, as she spoke, that she had no evidence for this statement, which however she believed to be true. The President, as she saw it, was yielding, and it was not a moment for
exactitude. “You think so?” asked the President, turning to her with a look of thoughtful regard, as if she had made a weighty statement which could tip the balance of his opinion. “Oh, yes,” prevaricated Domna. “I have several tutees who talk to me of his Joyce course. And I hear them discuss it in the store. And he is wonderful in the Sophomore Orals, very kind, very thorough.” The President bit on his pipe. “And you, John?” “Same here,” said John. “I have one student who is doing Critical Theory with him—a first-rate girl he’s taken great pains with. Otherwise, our fields don’t coincide but I have the same rough impression as Domna. Or, rather, to be exact, I would say that there was a division of opinion about him, with his partisans very vociferous.”

  “Hmn,” said the President, looking up. “It may be that he has settled down this year and gotten the bit between his teeth. Your information is probably more recent than mine. What impresses me most, however”—he studied them—“is the fact that you and Domna are here to represent him. That speaks to me very well for Hen. You’re intelligent and quick and straight as a die, both of you, two of my finest young teachers and one of you a writer as well.” He gazed appreciatively at Domna, who had just published some poems in a little magazine. She stared at the carpet, in embarrassment, since she had just told him a lie. His eyes once again canvassed them. They looked at each other and hesitated. They had not yet directly mentioned the main point—the issue of political freedom—and now that the interview appeared to be ending, they could see no suitable avenue of approach to it. It seemed, in fact, irrelevant to the friendly understanding which had finally been established among the three of them. As upright young people, moreover, brought up in an old-fashioned tradition, they had a trained distaste for outright lying that extended to the outright act of catching another in it; to come on the President in a lie, to see him flush up and betray himself, would be to come on Noah in his nakedness and commit the sin of Ham; they felt a pudent loyalty to the President’s façade. John’s wiry dark eyebrows knitted, and he gave a slight warning shake of the head.

  “You’ll hear from me within the next few days,” said Maynard, rising, “and many thanks for your information. You can tell Hen from me that he has two pretty potent advocates.” Domna seized his hand and nearly kissed it. “Oh, thank you,” she cried, beaming. John gave him a steady grip. “Thanks, Maynard,” he said earnestly. The President watched them go and turned back to his desk with a sigh. From his window, he could see them bound down the outside steps and perform a sort of caper of victory, like a pair of students he had favored against his ruing judgment.

  CHAPTER IX

  Discovered

  MULCAHY WAS not much impressed. “You let him pull the wool over your eyes,” was the verdict he returned to Domna that same evening in his car, when he came to fetch her for the chicken supper that Cathy, despite his remonstrances, had spent the bulk of the day preparing. “You aren’t supposed to know,” he pointed out to Cathy, as he gloomily observed the festive preparations: the silver-polish brought out, books dusted, pictures straightened; even the photograph of Joyce’s death-mask received a sweep of the dust-rag. “What will she think of all this?” he demanded, running the vacuum-cleaner, borrowed from the next-door neighbor, over the tan living-room rug with its dark-brown border. “The house stinks of fatted calf.” But Cathy, self-contented, had simply gone on humming a love-ballad. “You old fuddydud,” she finally teased him, dropping a kiss on his tiny bald spot, as he sat slumped on the davenport, staring into space, “do I have to have a special reason for keeping a nice house?” And she smacked the green cushions on either side of him, singing the trashy ballad, a suspiciously recent favorite with her, that she had got out of one of the children’s songbooks: “ ‘Oh, what care I for my house and my land? What care I for my-y-y treasure-oh? What care I for my new-wedded lord?’ ” Patting her back hair, she glided out to the kitchen, leaving him with a bottle of Windex and instructions to polish the glass tray on top of the coffee-table. In the back of the house, the children were being read to by a sitter at fifty cents an hour.

  It was not so much, he assured himself, that he feared Domna’s guessing. He had been crediting her with normal intelligence and assuming that, of course, she knew by this time and was simply going through the forms as he was: did she suppose Cathy was deaf to what was said on the telephone? What got under his skin was the unseasonableness of this celebration: the way the two women, separately, but in perfect unison, had leapt to the conclusion that it was all settled and done with, when Maynard, as far as he could see, had yielded nothing but a vague promise to think it over. Every jangled nerve in his body warned him against accepting this formula; as he drove off to return the sitter and get Domna, he was fully conscious of the dangers attending a premature détente. So much so, that he was half tempted to disobey orders and not stop at the liquor-store for the bottle of whiskey decreed by Cathy, since Cathy, though she would not admit it, had a poor head for liquor and had begun to take all too readily to these little nips with Domna that now seemed to be the order of the day. But, thanks to his fear of displeasing her and setting off some sort of scene, the bottle was in the seat beside him when he called for Domna and learned from her reluctant lips the tell-tale fact that she had been suppressing: Maynard, it turned out, had led the conceited pair through the interview without once permitting a mention of the only issue that counted!

  He caught his breath when he heard it, and only his feelings as a host prevented him from letting her have it, straight out, in the car. He drew on his reserves of magnanimity and spoke to her with patience, as he had learned to do with the children, analyzing a process step by step, taking into account their slower rate of learning; the drive home seemed to him endless and at the same time too short. “It’s a dead give-away, Domna,” he expatiated. “Analyze it out for yourself. Assume Maynard was ignorant, when he fired me, of my Party record—something I don’t concede for a moment but which seems to appeal to your generous heart. Is it likely that his pal, Furness, whom you insisted on taking into your confidence, wouldn’t have rushed around to inform him the minute he heard the news? Not ’arf likely, is it?” he gloated, unable to keep a thrust of plebeian malice from his tone. “Henry, I’ve thought of that,” said Domna, in her low, restive, bien élevé voice. “It’s strange. I can’t explain it.” “I can explain it very well,” he asserted. “Having got his briefing from your friend, Howard, he met the two of you with a well-prepared story. Don’t imagine that a single word of that interview was extemporized; every gesture, every pause, I’ll wager, was rehearsed before a mirror, and all very carefully calculated to steer you away from the main point. Why, he took you through that session like a regular Intourist guide with a party of dumb fellow-travelers. One direct question from either of you, and Maynard’s goose would have been cooked. You had him on the ropes and you didn’t know it. The bloody fool’s scared to death, Domna; he can’t afford to have a charge of bias made; his whole career of straddling is at stake. He’s a corpse, a well-preserved corpse, rotten with inner corruption, pourri, my girl, pourri—one breath of fresh air, and he’d stink, like the estimable Father Zossima. Don’t think he doesn’t know it.” He turned up the hill into his driveway and lowered his voice as he did so; the elucidation of his topic was banishing his first irritation; he began to feel content, as though everything were back in its place. “As a matter of fact,” he descanted, “Maynard proved to you by his silence that he had something to hide. Put yourself in his place. If he were innocent, and Howard came running to him with the charges, what would be his natural reaction? He wouldn’t wait ten days to blarney you. He’d have you and me too on the carpet inside of sixty minutes to demand a retraction pronto. Right? Of course he would.” He headed the car into the garage and jerked on the brake with emphasis. “Why say with such offhandedness,” he prodded her, “ ‘we all know Hen is no Communist,’ when nobody has mentioned the possibility, if not to put a denial into the record?” He switched
off the lights and the motor but made no move to get out. From the other end of the breezeway, through the open door of the dark garage, they heard Cathy’s voice thinly calling, “Hen, is it you? Have you got Domna with you?” He tooted the horn, their signal, and listened for the door to close. “You see,” he said swiftly, “it’s the same thing with Cathy and her heart. Do you suppose Furness didn’t tell him all about it and yet, according to you, Maynard put on a bland face and pretended great shock and surprise. He couldn’t let you know that Furness had been talking.” To his annoyance, the garage-lights came on; Cathy, in the kitchen, he supposed, was manifesting impatience. “Hadn’t we better go in?” urged Domna. “Cathy must be wondering. . . .”