Mary McCarthy

by Mary McCarthy

  Meanwhile, over fried sausages, red-apple rings, fried potatoes, fried chicken, fried onions, in the coffee-shop of the old hotel, the poets who were still on schedule were relenting somewhat toward the conference. The old mountain town was very picturesque, with red-brick dwellings, trimmed in white, with green shutters, fronting directly on the single street, which, from its open end, looked out onto rolling farm country, stone houses and great barns, as onto the land of Canaan seen from Mount Nebo. The young poets were insensible to scenery and to the spirit of history, as well as to good farm-style cooking, but the older poets’ lyres were more attuned to the atmospheric. The resemblance to the Promised Land, first pointed out by Miss Mansell, tempted them into speculations on the influence of the Old Testament on American history. They wondered whether this likeness to the prophesied Canaan had not been seized upon by the early settlers as a form of verification, which had led them into the theological controversies so characteristic of this region, and so much more prolonged and literal than the theocratic rivalries of New England—“These people,” proclaimed the red-faced poet, with a billow of the arm that included the startled waitress and the cashier, “still imagine that they are living in the Bible.” “And up there on the hill, we still imagine it, in our own fashion,” edged in Furness, with a plaintive smile, trying to draw the conversation back to Jocelyn itself. “Our progressive methodology,” he announced, “with its emphasis on faith and individual salvation, is a Protestant return to the Old Testament.” Miss Mansell turned to look at him politely, but the others went on eating, as though he had not spoken. “And our presidents, poor fellows,” he continued, on a diminishing scale of assurance, “live the dishonored life of prophets, a life of exposure and contumely, for trying to put into practice literally the precepts of a primitive liberalism.” The poets still ignored him, except for the whiskered poet, who threw him a glance of fiery rebuke—this was the sort of observation that the poets were supposed to frame, and it was unseemly to have it supplied, ready made up, by jackanapes on the faculty.

  The poets had no interest in Jocelyn or its President, whom they took for granted as the usual money-raiser, not too successful, to judge by the size of the fee. The President they knew generically, and this was sufficient. At a given point in the afternoon’s proceedings, he could be counted on to rise from his seat and put a question that had long been bothering him—why did not modern poetry communicate to him? Somewhat more perplexed than the publishers, but vigorous and manly, he would call on modern poetry to step down from its pedestal and meet with the ordinary man in the marketplace; he would ask for a positive contribution to the vexed debates of our times. This speech, which was not yet known to the President or his faculty, was foreknown to the poets down to the last metaphor, just as the red-faced poet’s extempore speech attacking Eliot was as well known to his confrères as it was to his own wife. And they could anticipate with equal lucidity the attack on themselves that would be launched from some unexpected quarter in the Literature department, an attack which would be backed up, since this was a progressive college, by a sudden foray of students from the audience who would hurl a daring question or two and then fall into silence, nudging each other vainly to start the assault again. The deadly animosity between the professor and the poet was somewhat muted here by the fact that, strangely, there appeared to be only two literary careerists in the Literature department, the young versifier, Ellison, and his ally, Mulcahy, whose empty place still gaped at the long table—both of whom, naturally, were supposedly managing the conference, for ends of their own that had not yet become manifest but which, predictably, had something to do with a power-struggle within the department and a drive toward prestige in the literary world outside. Of the two, the poets preferred Mulcahy, who was a man of some acuity, but they did not indicate this, any more than they gave way to the natural attraction they felt to the little Rejnev girl and her friend, Mrs. Fortune—they had learned not to take sides, even with the losers, which in this case was their instinct. They came to Jocelyn in the same spirit that dentists or doctors attend a professional convention, knowing that the public speeches would be, on the whole, very tiresome, but that, if they could keep out of the way of the faculty, they could drink and visit with their friends. The more experienced they were, the more they considered the whole project to be an affair of mutual exploitation—a contract, like any other, in which they did not intend to be worsted. They gulped their caffeine tablets, therefore, and smiled encouragingly at the little Rejnev girl, who looked very white at the prospect of taking the chair. The red-haired man, Mulcahy, was still absent, which they put down as a black mark in their book.

  An hour and a half before, the President had had a shattering experience that altogether eclipsed the poetry conference from his mind, so that he did not, as it happened, make the speech that he would certainly have made under normal circumstances. Without knocking, brushing by the secretary, as she explained later, Henry Mulcahy had burst into the President’s private office, white-faced, malevolent, trembling, and demanded to know what the President had meant by interrogating a visiting poet about Mulcahy’s political affiliations. A shocking scene followed. Mulcahy, as Maynard told Bentkoop, as soon as he could get him on the phone, literally shook his fist in Maynard’s face, threatened to expose him to the A.A.U.P., and to every liberal magazine and newspaper in the country. He was going to write a sequel to the President’s magazine article that would reveal to the whole world the true story of a professional liberal: a story of personal molestation, spying, surveillance, corruption of students by faculty stool-pigeons. A girl-student, he shouted, had already confessed to him in his office, when he faced her with it, a sordid tale of spying assignments given her by the White Russian, Miss Domna Rejnev.

  “What could I do, John?” pleaded the President. “The man is quite mad. My first idea, naturally, was to throw him bodily out of my office. But then, God forgive me, I hesitated. I saw very clearly that he had me in a vise of blackmail. The campus was full of outsiders—these poets, other teachers, publishers, parents. What was I going to do? Fire him? I can’t fire him. He has a contract. I would have to show cause and that would mean, in all probability, a lawsuit. The college can’t afford it. The terrible thing, John, is that, on the surface, everything he says is true. We did interrogate the poet; the people in the Literature department were keeping tabs on him. It’s all twisted, of course, by his warped imagination to give a sinister meaning, but still those things were done. I sat there looking at him and I lost all faith in the power of my denials to convince anybody, even myself. Maybe our behavior did have an ugly little kink in it: I don’t know; I’ve lost the ability to say. Tell me, John—you believe in religion—what am I being punished for?” John made an indeterminate sound. “At that moment,” continued the President, his voice desperately rising, as he tried to laugh, “I looked out the window and saw nuns, nuns on Jocelyn’s driveway, going into the chapel. I thought I had gone mad.” John laughed. “They came for the afternoon session. One of the poets is a convert.” “I know, I know,” said the President, impatiently. “But listen to me, John. Then I said to myself, ‘I will bribe him.’ I actually thought of offering him five years’ salary to leave the campus today. But then of course I saw that that was what he wanted. He would have a club over me for life. He could always say, with truth, that I had tried to bribe him into silence.”

  “So what did you do?” said John, as the President’s voice died away. “I didn’t do anything,” retorted Maynard. “I just sat there. Miss Crewes opened the door a crack to find out what was going on and she saw me sitting there, with my head in my hands, and Hen sitting opposite, cool as a cucumber. She thought I had had a nervous breakdown or a stroke, like the last president, till I looked up and told her to go away.” John laughed. But the President was beyond resentment. “Finally, I raised my eyes and I said to him, ‘What is it you want of me, man? Do you merely want to ruin me or have you an ulterior purpose? Tell
me that, please,’ I said, ‘just as a matter of interest, just between ourselves. Are you a conscious liar or a self-deluded hypocrite?’ ” Over the wire, John whistled. “You know what he answered?” asked the President. “He quoted the famous old paradox, the paradox of the liar. ‘A Cretan says, all Cretans are liars.’ That was his answer. As for interpretation, he informed me that the problem was subjective. ‘We’re none of us certain of our motives; we can only be certain of facts.’ And these facts, which he’d already enumerated, could not be denied by me.” John sighed. “Then,” said the President, “he quite changed his tune. ‘I’m not concerned with truth, Maynard,’ he said to me, very straightforwardly. ‘I’m concerned with justice. Justice for myself as a superior individual and for my family.’ ”

  The President’s voice sounded weary. “He claimed the right to pursue his profession, the right to teach without interference or meddling, the right to bring up his family in reasonable circumstances. What could I say? I spoke of my own rights and duties, to the trustees, to the student-body. And he snapped me up immediately. ‘And does that include the duty to interrogate visiting poets on my political affiliations?’ ” Maynard laughed. “I admitted that that had been misguided, and he offered, very sweetly, to accept my apology.” There was a protracted silence. “So?” said John, anxiously. “So,” replied the President firmly, “I concluded that it was best for me to resign.” He heard the young man gasp. “Yes,” he asseverated, with something of his old buoyancy. “I saw that I was too much incriminated. The college would never get rid of him as long as I was at the tiller. With another skipper, who can’t be blackmailed, there’s a fair chance of getting him out. I confess I thought of Samson, bringing down the temple on the Philistines and himself.”

  “Maynard,” cried the young man, protestingly. “You haven’t told him?” “No,” said Maynard. “But Miss Crewes knows and Esther. We’ve already sent off a letter to the head of the board of trustees.” He sighed. “Are the poets gone, by the way?” “I don’t think so,” said John. “I think the party at Howard’s is still going strong.” The President chuckled. “That Miss Mansell, you know—I think she had something to do with giving me courage to do it.” John made an inquiring sound. “I used to be quite a classicist,” said the President, “when I was a kid in high school. I wanted to be a lawyer and Cicero was my hero. That talk on Virgil and that reading brought it all back to me. It was running through my head all the time I was talking to him and he was quoting paradoxes at me. ‘You damnable demagogue,’ I kept cursing him under my breath as I watched him. And then I felt guilty. A demagogue—what does it mean? A leader of the demos or the people. I suppose, in a certain sense, I must be saying farewell to progressivism. At any rate, John, at the very end of our talk, I just looked at him and declaimed the first line of the first Catiline oration.” Taking a firm grip on the telephone, he threw his handsome head back and brave tears of oratory rose into his forensic eyes. “ ‘Quo usque tandem, Catilina, abutere patientia nostra?’ ‘How far at length, O Catiline, will you abuse our patience?’ ” At the other end of the phone, the young man signaled to his wife, who crept up and put her ear to the receiver as the President’s noble voice rolled on.

  THE END

  A CHARMED LIFE

  One

  JOHN SINNOTT cut his hand trying to raise a stuck window in the downstairs bathroom. They had been established in their new-bought house a month, and John was still doing minor repairs. The summer tenant had left a row of cigarette burns on the upstairs-bathroom mantel, a big grease spot on the rug in the dining room (where he had spilled a platter of steak), a broken windowpane, an ink-stain worthy, as Martha Sinnott said, of Martin Luther on her white writing desk. The tenant was a bachelor lawyer from New York, with a theatrical clientele; and he had paid a very good rent, Martha reminded John, who was inclined to fly into tempers and feel himself misused. You had to expect some breakage, said Martha virtuously. They, too, had broken things in their day, she pointed out, reciting an inventory of their own sins as tenants. But for John it was not the same thing. He declined to compare himself with a tenant who let his friends drive their cars all over the lawn and shoot at bottles when they had been drinking and fall into Martha’s herb box, which she had planted in such a fever that spring, when they came up to get the house ready. John did not think that the fact that the tenant had left some liquor in the cabinet compensated for the damage. Nor did he think that the dining-room rug was the place to carve a steak, even though, as Martha pointed out, the table did wobble.

  He was angry and he grew angrier all through September, as he came upon new scars and scratches, which he no longer mentioned to Martha, for it distressed her to be told of the tenant’s misdeeds, partly for the tenant’s sake and partly for John’s—she feared he was becoming unbalanced. Ever since Labor Day—the day the tenant had vacated—things had not been right between them. Martha, it seemed, had constituted herself the tenant’s advocate, finding excuses for him, palliating, appealing for clemency with big sorrowful brown eyes, like a regular little Portia. And in order to excuse the tenant she would gently indicate the house’s drawbacks—the wobbling table, the erratic stove, the fact that she had not got around to making curtains for the bedroom. This, for John, was indefensible. He was a young man of passionate loyalties and he would hear no word against the house, any more than he would against Martha. He detested her habit of self-criticism; he wished her and hers to be invulnerable.

  He detested it most of all when she was right, or partly right, as she was, he knew, about the tenant. But she did not understand, as if perversely, that his anger at the lawyer was necessary to him, and principally on her account: he could not bear that her house should be treated with contumely. For Martha was in a delicate situation. She ought never to have come back here—and both John and Martha knew it—to the village of New Leeds, which she had left seven years before, when she had run away with John.

  The Sinnotts were a romantic couple. Strangers still glanced after them on the street, wherever they went; waiters smiled; butchers beamed—as if they were morganatic, said Martha, who had begun to find the position ridiculous. It was partly their appearance. Martha was a strange, poetical-looking being, with very fair, straight hair done in a little knot, a quaint oval face, very dark, wide-set eyes, and a small, slight figure; she had been on the stage. John, also, was quite remarkable-looking, tall and small-boned, with high coloring, neatly inscribed features, and dark-brown, stiffly curling hair; he was the son of a military family and was often taken for English. Nobody ventured to guess Martha’s origins; in fact she was the child of a Swedish engineer and an Italian music teacher, who had borne her in Juneau, Alaska.

  On the afternoon of John’s mishap, they were wearing matching white wool sweaters. Martha was sitting in the parlor, on the sofa, with yards of heavy white linen on her lap, making curtains for the bedroom; by her side was a box of brass rings. The scene was just what they had desired when they bought the house—the coal fire burning in the grate, white eighteenth-century panelling, deep window embrasures, the old black horsehair sofa, and Martha sewing tranquilly, like some Protestant pastor’s wife in an old tale, her mother’s gold thimble on her finger. And like the wife sewing in the fairy tale, Martha was wishing for a child. She wanted a center for their life, something, as she said ardently, to live for. Martha was a purposeful young woman; she sought a meaning for everything. She did not understand, yet, why they had come back to New Leeds, and she was waiting, eagerly, for the answer. She could not settle down in the house, as she told her husband, until she knew why they were here.

  But on this particular afternoon she had decided that it was because they were going to have a child, probably, and her soul drew a breath of relief. John did not want a baby, so he flatly said, but he had never made her do anything to prevent it—he would change, Martha assured herself, if she actually became pregnant. With these thoughts running through her head, she was plying her n
eedle contentedly when she heard a funny sound, a sort of muffled howl, that made her think a wild animal had got into the back of the house. This fantastic surmise permitted her to go on sewing steadily, like a sleeper who dreams an explanation for an alarming noise. She had hemmed nearly half a length before she awoke to the fact that the funny sound was her husband, John, in the kitchen. “What is it?” she called out in an angry voice mechanically fending off the knowledge that something bad must have happened to him. She laid aside the material, stabbing in the needle with the resigned, irritable patience of a person who is used to senseless interruptions. A hollow groan answered: “Hurt . . . [gasp] . . . myself.” Then she flew to the kitchen.

  It was a fairly deep, crescent-shaped cut in the cushion of the field of Mars. The blood was spurting into the sink under a stream of cold water from the faucet. In the cellar, the noisy old pump was hammering as if in its death rattle. Martha resisted the impulse to turn the water down. “Let me see,” she begged, but John elbowed her sharply away as she hovered on tiptoe beside him, trying to get a second look at the cut. He kept holding it under the cold water and then licking it, dog style—he clung to the belief that the human tongue was antiseptic. “Bandage,” he gasped, gesturing her off with a look of ferocious hatred. Martha obeyed; she fetched gauze pads, adhesive tape, and scissors from the upstairs bathroom, taking her time, though she had the impression she was hurrying. She was no good at first aid, and minor injuries flustered her. She considered them unnecessary.