Mary McCarthy

by Mary McCarthy

  She jumped up to turn the chicken in the pan, returned to her seat, and started chopping the onion and the herbs with determination, resolved to be matter-of-fact and cheerful—the way John liked her. “Did I ever tell you,” she began, smiling faintly, “about the Youngs’ Assumption Day party? It’s the climax of the social season. All the New Leeds irregulars are there with their service stripes and wound badges. It’s like a veterans’ convention. It happens every year, and every year the doctor is busy from midnight to dawn with splints and bandages. The drugstore lays in an extra stock of Covermark. The ambulance driver used to say that he slept with his clothes on that night. Even the animals get hurt. Sandy Gray threw a knife at Ellen one time and hit their French poodle. There was a big scandal in the town because the new doctor wouldn’t sew up the dog’s wound. The Grays were furious; the old doctor always treated dogs.” “Did the dog die?” sharply interposed John. “No,” said Martha. “Of course not. Nobody dies. Hardly ever. That’s it; they just get crippled.” “It seems to me,” observed John, “that you’re all wrong about the death principle you keep harping on. The inhabitants, from your own account, seem to bear a charmed life.” He set his lips somewhat primly, as though he had scored a telling point. Martha ignored the bite in the word “harping.” “It could be,” she mused, looking up at him with wondering eyes. “Yes, of course, it could be. But you could read it the other way, too. They could be dead already. You can’t kill a ghost, you know.” She reflected. “That’s exactly what I feel like,” she confided, elated by the discovery. “A revenante. One who comes back.” To emphasize the point, she brought the knife down hard on the onion, which slipped from her grasp; her left fore-finger slowly began to bleed.

  They stared at each other incredulously. “We’re just like the others,” whispered Martha. They both began to laugh, in loud, resonant peals. The whole house seemed to laugh; the pans rattled on the kitchen walls. “Sh-h-h,” said Martha. “Somebody might hear.” Though there was nobody for miles about, John modulated his amusement. “Who?” he muttered. “Why, the Fates,” said Martha, with a sort of wild gaiety. “They can hear that we’re laughing at them.” “I thought,” retorted John, “that we were laughing at ourselves.” “It’s the same thing,” pointed out Martha. “You’re not supposed to laugh at a joke life is playing on you.”

  She held up her dripping finger ruefully, like an admonishment. “We’re just like the others,” she repeated. “ ‘He hath put down the mighty from their seats.’ ” John nodded. For the first time, he let himself yield to Martha’s sibylline wisdom. She was right, he said darkly to himself: they should never have come back here. And at once he felt pity for her, as for any doomed, fluttering creature; he thought of the bird that had been caught last week in the chimney. “Come here,” he ordered. He took a gauze pad from its envelope and wrapped it around her finger. “Poor mouse,” he said tenderly. “Poor, frightened, jumpy mouse.” He put an arm about her as she stood leaning against him. “Poor John,” she replied. They smiled sadly at each other; the air was cleansed of reproaches. “So where do we go from here?” he muttered, rhetorically, tightening his arm about her waist.

  But Martha had made up her mind. “To the doctor, of course,” she said lightly, whirling out of his embrace. She threw the chopped vegetables into the pan with the chicken, poured in some white wine, turned the stove on low, and went into the next room to telephone. “The doctor will wait for us,” she reported, coming back. John did not protest. He had decided to trust her. Her own cut was not serious, but it was a warning that his must be attended to; this was Martha’s logic. “We’ll have liquor on our breath,” he said mildly. Martha shrugged. “And people will say we’ve been fighting,” she added. “Don’t you care?” inquired John, as he rose and let her put his coat around his shoulders. “No,” she said. “After all, it’s true—in a way.”

  They went out into the starry night.

  She was happy, he saw, as she always was when she had come to a decision. In despair, Martha found hope. The notion that they were just like the others had lifted her spirits. She did not really believe it, he suddenly perceived. More than ever now, she felt that they were different. She was a little tipsy and she stumbled. “Don’t fall into the herb box,” she cautioned, with a giggle. John took her arm firmly in his.

  Two

  JANE AND WARREN Coe had asked the Miles Murphys over from Digby for the day. Everybody in New Leeds had been counting on Jane to do it; the community wanted to know how Miles Murphy was taking his second wife’s return. “Why, it’s simple as pie,” Jane had been scoffing, cheerfully, all summer long. “I’ll just ask them down. They won’t see anything strange in it. We always ask them down in October, to go for a walk or something. Don’t we, Warren?” “Nearly always,” emended Warren, who was a very conscientious person. “Why, if we don’t ask them this year,” yawned Jane, through September, “Miles will be hurt. Miles is awfully touchy. He’ll think it’s because of Martha.”

  Nevertheless, when the appointed day came, both the Coes felt uneasy. They were afraid Martha would find out, and though, of course, it was not Martha’s business whom they asked where, they now wished they had told her. The most horrible contingency had presented itself to Warren, a poor sleeper, during the night: he imagined Martha and John, out for a walk on the beach, surprising him and Jane with the Murphys. “Wouldn’t that be awful?” agreed Jane, in a solemn whisper, when he confided this fear to her at breakfast. She clapped her hand to her cheek and dropped her big, undershot jaw, staring at Warren over the toaster. But secretly she was excited by the prospect; her schoolgirlish heart throbbed to adventure. She liked the plot to thicken, so long as she and Warren could figure in it as innocent spectators. “How could I know?” she already heard herself lamenting, her irrepressible giggle starting to make its way up, like a bubble, from her solar plexus. Just the same, she was nervous. She let Warren have his way about the choice of picnic site: even though the cove was tame, compared to walking out on the breakwater, it was safe because Martha hated it. Both Martha and Miles Murphy could be dangerous enemies, she said thoughtfully.

  The Coes had no enemies. They were the best-liked couple in New Leeds. Jane was a big, tawny, ruminative girl, now thirty-eight, who played the oboe and the bagpipes. She had a fresh, orangey, milkmaid’s complexion and round, curious blue eyes that kept rolling in their sockets; she liked to sit crosslegged and always looked as if she were still wearing a middy blouse and bloomers. Her maternal grandfather, a German chemist, had invented a children’s laxative, and her grandfather on the other side, also German, had done very well in the sheet-music business. Unlike the other New Leedsians, she had never had to worry about money. Though you could not tell it from the way they lived, she was said to have a capital of more than half a million very shrewdly invested by her mother’s man of business. Besides this, Warren had a tiny income that had been left him by his father’s bachelor brother, who was something in shipping in New Orleans: Jane had a multitude of cousins but Warren’s family, on both sides, was dying out; his father had died young, and his mother was an invalid.

  Warren was an only child. He was now fifty, but you would never guess it. He had an eager, boyish face, rather like a bird’s, with a thin, beaked nose and bright spots of color, high in either cheek. He had fair, thin hair, which Jane always cut for him, using professional clippers, so that he had the mazed look of a person just out of a barber’s chair. His frame was slight and thin-chested. He smiled a great deal, happily, and had a habit of raising himself on the balls of his small feet, as if he were trying to see over the heads of a crowd. This alert, expectant air was always with him. He seldom sat down, for before he came to New Leeds he had taught for nearly twenty years at a school of design and had spent his days and nights moving about from easel to easel, looking over shoulders. He was a very excitable, forward-gazing person, very moralistic and high-principled; every moment was an adventure to him. Warren loved his relationship wit
h Jane; they told each other all their thoughts, exclaiming over the differences. Jane was indolent; he was full of ginger. Jane was a bit unscrupulous; he was an idealist. Jane was equable; he was easily cast down. But they shared an appetite for life that woke them every morning, greedy for the new day, to be divided, fairly, between them, like a big fresh apple.

  This greed for experience was their innocent vice. They did not smoke, except for Jane’s occasional denicotinized cigarette; they drank in extreme moderation, often from the same glass: “I’ll just take some of Jane’s,” Warren usually proffered, partly because he hated to waste anything and partly for the fun of sharing. They never touched real coffee. When they were alone, they ate whatever health food Jane had been reading about—yogurt, wheat germ, figs, vitamin soups made in the blender with nine raw vegetables. Yet they were not cranks; like good children, they cleaned their plates when they were out to dinner and came back for seconds. They appreciated fine cooking but thought it unfair to Jane to keep her standing over a hot stove when nature outdoors was so beautiful. They loved long walks, and Warren was a systematic nudist, though he always took pains not to give offense to the neighbors; it shocked him to see some of his friends stripping on the beach, in plain view of an old lady who sat in her second-story window with field glasses.

  They seemed utterly different from the other New Leeds people—a thing Jane often pondered on, aloud, in a dreamy reverie, studying her bare toes in her Mexican thong sandals and half-wondering whether she was getting a callous. You would never have thought, she said, that she and Warren would fit in; they were too normal. And yet they were crazy about it; and in ten years’ residence—they had come during the war when Jane had been certain the small city they lived in would be bombed—they had become an indispensable fixture. They were the social center of New Leeds; they supposed it was just because they were so normal. They served as a sort of switchboard that plugged in on the various crisscrossed lines. “We’re just a public utility,” said Warren with his mild, happy smile. In all the years they had been here, they had never had a fight with anybody, not even with Miles Murphy, who had fought with nearly the whole town at the time of his divorce from Martha. They had managed to keep his friendship while refusing to take sides. “I have a lot of respect for Miles,” Warren still reiterated, after seven years; he was not afraid to say it to Martha. As he explained to her when he was painting her portrait last month, he liked her because he could say to her the things he really thought. Loyalty to a side, he said, had been instilled in him by his southern mother, but he now thought you had to be loyal to all sides, to the truth as you saw it, which, when you came down to it, meant being loyal to yourself. Cleaning his brushes, he watched Martha anxiously to see if she followed his thought. He had a way, he knew, of making things that were simple, darn it, to other people very complex to himself, but Martha always listened, with her absent, encouraging nod. “Probably it’s an old idea to you,” he said apologetically, and Martha smiled. She never tried to deceive him. “I value that quality!” he always cried when her candid tongue was aspersed.

  What he valued in Miles was something different—Miles’s intellectual equipment. Sitting on the beach, in the noonday sun, he felt thrilled, as always, by Miles’s mind. The man was not attractive physically. He was a fat, freckled fellow with a big frame, a reddish crest of curly hair, and small, pale-green eyes, like grapes about to burst. His large face, with its long plump crooked nose, was flushed from the efforts of his digestive tract: lobster shells and the bones of two fried chickens lay piled up, waiting to be buried; two empty Moselle bottles, from Jane’s father’s cellar, lay on their sides in the sand. As usual, after eating and drinking, Miles was breathing heavily, like a spent athlete: he gave the impression of virtuous fatigue even when he had been over-indulging. But he had a brilliant mind, and beside him Warren felt very humble. It was Warren’s great sorrow that he had gone straight from a military academy into art school; he had missed the experience of college. Miles had been educated by the Jesuits at Fordham, and from there he had gone on to Heidelberg and the Sorbonne and the London School of Economics. Later on, for a brief time, he had studied with Jung at Zurich. There was scarcely anything Warren could think of that Miles had not done; he had been a successful playwright, with a hit show, about the Jesuit fathers, running on Broadway when he was only twenty-three, a boxer, practically professional, who used to work out with Hemingway, a psychologist, a lay analyst, a writer of adventure stories, a practicing mystic, a magazine editor. He was on that kick, as he called it, when he met Martha, who was just a girl graduate at the time. He was the type, said Jane, that was very attractive to women; he had had three wives and innumerable mistresses and a couple of illegitimate children, besides the present baby and the little boy who had died. And of course, he was a heavy drinker, which proved, according to Martha, that he really cared nothing about women. All heavy drinkers, she had insisted, were sexless underneath—a remark that had been bothering Warren for years. Warren had a very good memory, which he had never thought of as a handicap or an anti-social trait before he came to New Leeds. He used to store up the things his friends said and come back later, if need be, for clarification, after he had turned them over in his own mind. But here, when he reminded people of something they had said five years before, they either did not remember having said it or announced, lightly, that they had changed their opinion. This vagueness and instability put Warren in a dreadful state; he felt as if he held a ring of keys to fascinating cabinets that had had their locks changed privily by some malicious prankster. Looking at Miles now, for instance, brooding and silent, with his scarred chin sunk onto his chest, smoking a cigarette that his new wife had lit and put between his lips, Warren felt as if he might possibly have the key to him in that long-ago observation of Martha’s. But when he had recalled it to her, timidly, in another connection (for he did not see quite how it worked, Freudianly), Martha had made a grimace and said, with a rueful glance at John, “Oh dear, did I say that?”

  Warren hungered for serious conversation, which was one of the reasons he had recently turned from nature to portraiture; he liked to draw the sitter out. On other occasions, he was constantly being disappointed, though New Leeds was full of people who had had interesting lives. “I’d like to get your point of view,” he would say, finally, at a cocktail party, to the person he had been waiting patiently to query, but the person, like as not, was tipsy by the time Warren got to him or else only wanted to gossip. Watching Miles today, Warren had the premonition that he was going to be disappointed again. Last year, when the Murphys had come down, Miles had been very interesting; he had advised Warren to read Nietzsche, and Warren had been looking forward to a renewal of the discussion. He had several points he wanted to make; he had underlined passages in the Modern Library Zarathustra that seemed to contradict some things Miles had said about Nietzsche’s thought. But Miles, when he had arrived this noon, had promptly turned the subject aside. “The translations are all terrible,” he said briskly. “You can’t understand Nietzsche if you don’t read him in German.” Warren, for a second, had been mad as a hornet; a few years ago, the same thing had happened with Plato. A point had come up, and Miles had said, “Read the Republic,” and when Warren had done it and called up Miles in New York, all primed on the cave myth, Miles had told him that you couldn’t understand Plato except in the original. Reminded of his earlier admonition, he had said, “I don’t remember it. I must have been drunk.”

  Still, Warren had not yet given up hope of the afternoon. It all depended on chance. Miles, as Jane said, was a moody soul. It was the mixture of blood in him; he was half Irish and half German. Miles himself said it was the devil of a combination; when he was in black spirits, he talked about himself as a mongrel and blamed his parents for marrying. That was his Irish mood. On his German side, he was more poetic and visionary. He had a theory that the Germans and the Irish were all the same mystic people—Celts, and he used Jane’s taw
ny hair to prove it. He got his own red hair, he told them, from his mother’s family. He had an affinity with Jane; he liked to get her to talk about her German ancestors. That was why she always brought up the Moselle from her father’s cellar for him. Warren was interested in Jane’s ancestors too; the family’s scientific interests had opened his eyes to a whole new side of life and changed the direction of his painting. But he always felt a little disturbed when Miles got going on Friedrich Barbarossa—it made him think of the Nazis. In another mood, however, Miles would give the Germans what-for and say their trouble was they had never been Christianized properly, except the people in the Rhineland, where Jane’s family came from.

  Like all the outstanding people Warren had ever known, Miles was inconsistent. Today he might suddenly stand up and shake himself and tell his wife they were going home. Or he might come to the studio, where Zarathustra was laid out, and talk for the rest of the day. And the wife and baby would have to wait till he was ready to go, even if it was the middle of the night. One night, last winter in New York, the Coes had heard, the baby had nearly been smothered under the overcoats on a bed at a wild party. Miles had a theory about children; he thought you should treat them rough until they reached the age of reason, which he set at eight or nine, the year the child was able to learn its catechism and prepare for its first communion. This theory, Warren admitted, made him see red. And Miles meant it furthermore; he was not just talking through his hat. For a hard-boiled unbeliever, Miles had a strange admiration for the rules and observances of the church; Mother Church, he said, was a great little psychologist—look at the confessional. And he thought Spare the Rod was sound psychology too, up to the age of reason.