Mary McCarthy

by Mary McCarthy

  The others had turned again to watch them. Unconsciously, they had both raised their voices, as if they were alone together and the rest of the room were blocked out. “What was that, Miles?” wondered Warren. “Say that again.” “Yes, let us in on it,” pleaded Jane. But Martha had risen, with a little grimace. “We must go,” she said. “Oh gee,” sighed Warren. “Just when it’s getting interesting.” But Martha shook her head. John Sinnott had fetched her cloak and was on his way to her with it like a galleon. Dolly Lamb stood up. Miles frowned as he watched young Sinnott put the cloak on Martha’s shoulders. He himself, he thought sourly, ought to have been the first to leave. Yet he had been having a fine time, sparring with Martha, before the others broke it up. It was like a bit of the old days. But it was frustrating to talk to her like that, with Jane Coe’s big ears flapping and Warren’s nose twitching for crumbs from the banquet, Helen looking tense and worried on his behalf, and John Sinnott’s warrior’s eye on them and his biceps flexed to defend Martha. Miles rose and stretched. “Maybe I’ll come to see you one of these days,” he said to Martha, with a slight yawn. Martha seemed taken aback. Was it possible that she was afraid of him still? “Umm,” she said, noncommittally.

  Everybody was on the move, all at once. They were picking their way out to the cars, guided by Warren’s flashlight. Miles stood in the parking space, waiting for Sinnott to move his old open Ford out of the way of his Cadillac. Helen and the baby were in the car, and Miles was watching the girl painter drive off first in her jeep, when, in the glare of Sinnott’s headlights, he became aware that Warren Coe was beside him, batting his eyes and wiggling his eyebrows and smiling an urgent question in the direction of Martha. For a minute, Miles could not divine what had got into him. Then he remembered the portrait. What Warren was saying in pantomime was that Miles should ask her, now, if it was all right for him to have it. Miles inwardly shrugged. Sober, he was not sure whether he wanted the painting, but he did not mind asking, just for the hell of it. He strolled up to the Sinnotts’ car and indicated to Martha that he wanted to speak to her. Martha rolled down her window. “I like that portrait of you,” he said in a casual tone. Martha’s eyebrows rose; she turned to her husband, who merely raced the engine. “Seriously?” she said in a lowered voice, looking back to where Warren was standing. “Seriously,” agreed Miles. “It’s far the best thing he’s done. In fact,” he continued, leaning his elbow on the little car’s window sash, “I’ve had the notion of buying it.” Martha stared. “You’re crazy,” she said. “Where would you put it?” She bit her lip. “Excuse me,” she corrected herself. “It’s none of my business.” “Warren tells me,” said Miles, “that he’d have to have your permission to sell it.”

  Martha looked at her husband. “Why not?” he said lightly. “You don’t want it.” “This isn’t a joke?” demanded Martha. “No, of course not. Why should it be?” returned Miles, rather irritably. “You really think Warren has something, then?” Miles nodded. “Why, then,” said Martha, gaily, “I think it’s marvelous. John, wouldn’t it be wonderful if Warren could be discovered after all these years?” John smiled briefly. “Yes,” he said. Miles had the feeling that Sinnott was inwardly laughing at him, and that Martha too would burst into merriment, the minute he turned away. She was peering at him critically as if to make out whether he was drunk. “Sleep on it,” she suggested, after a moment. Her voice was gentle and solicitous, but he felt the old rage rising in him at the notion that she was trying to manage him again, the first chance she got. In the eyes of this superior pair, he was nothing but a maudlin jackass. “Good night,” he said abruptly and moved away from the car.

  Four

  THE VICOMTE had come to call on the Sinnotts just after Sunday lunch. He was sitting in an easy chair, by the fireplace, holding a small earthenware dish of Martha’s pot-de-crême, vanilla, in his square, seamed hand. By his side rested his walking stick, and he was still puffing a little from his walk up the hill. Nobody knew his age. He had a large red face and dark-blond, straight, pomaded hair of a hue that could scarcely be dyed; he wore it combed back, without a part, and longish, like a woman’s short bob. His suit was a faded tan silk, cut rather loose, which looked as if it had been made for him in Japan many years back. The vicomte had a much-traveled mien, like a stout suitcase with frayed hotel stickers; today, he suggested the Orient-fans, a kimono, verandahs, matting. John had not recognized him, as he made his way up the driveway, with a basket of field-mushrooms, a house-gift, in one hand, and the stick, which he paused to rest on, in the other. He had the air of a meditative pilgrim toiling up to a monastery with an offering. “Why, it’s M. de Harnonville!” cried Martha, peering out the window, astonished and somewhat pleased that the vicomte had dressed to pay them a visit. For ordinary use, behind the counter in the liquor store, he wore a dark-blue T-shirt, a green eyeshade, blue jeans, and sandals. On his feet, at present, were a pair of high shoes, recently blackened, evidently, for the shoeblack was coming off on the chair’s white slipcover while John frowningly watched.

  Martha had put a little table down, for the custard cup and spoon, but M. de Harnonville ignored it, holding the cup in his hand and letting the spoon dribble custard onto his napkined lap in the most aristocratic fashion. He had come, it slowly transpired, to buy an early Seth Thomas clock that the Sinnotts had inherited with the house. He was also interested in a sundial, a birdbath, and a painted rocker, which he believed to be stored in the workshop. The previous owner, he said, coughing, had promised him these things, but since the poor bloody old chap had killed himself without making a will, M. de Harnonville stood ready to pay.

  John and Martha glanced quickly at each other. The thought flashed between them that the vicomte was in cahoots with the former handyman, who had already carried off a truckload of stuff in deference to the late owner’s supposed wishes and had nearly got away with the clock and a pretty silk-and-velvet patchwork quilt, worth over a hundred dollars, which he had stowed in an old bureau drawer. But the instant the suspicion entered her mind, Martha quashed it, shaking her head slightly as a warning to her husband to do likewise. She hated suspecting people, and the vicomte was popular in New Leeds, where he was known as “Paul” to everybody, from the bank president to the village idiots. Though he lived in a single, bare room back of his antique shop and ate his meals sitting at the counter of the local grille, reading a Boston tabloid, he was held to be an authority on everything going—world politics, wines, cooking, gardening, how to arrange your furniture. She and John, it seemed, had already got off on the wrong foot by sending to Boston for a shipment of reasonably priced, decent wine, after one look at the vicomte’s stock. You could not do that, the Coes hurried over to tell Martha when they heard about it via the express man: everybody here went to Paul, who got a percentage—how else would he live in the winter, when the antique business folded up?

  “You’ll have to get used to the folkways,” Warren told John, with one of his peaceful smiles. But John chafed against the village and the village chafed against him. “Be nice,” Martha kept feeling impelled to tell him on the brink of every occasion. “Be nice,” she had pleaded, just now, as she recognized the vicomte approaching. Callers took up too much time, he contended, and wasted Martha’s energy. He could not forget that they had come here for a purpose and he watched Martha’s outlay of energy with a sort of fanatic jealousy, as though there were only so much of it, a diminishing stock. He was still angry with her, she knew, because she had sat for the portrait. It was getting “involved” in New Leeds, he said—which she had promised him she would not do. And he was cross with Warren for having asked her. Just as he had predicted, she had come home worn out after each sitting, for Warren had taken advantage of the occasion to make her talk philosophy with him for three hours at a stretch. And he still kept popping around with what he called “unfinished questions.”

  “That’s life in the country,” Martha explained, patiently. In the country, she said, you had to
be disponible. Otherwise, people would say you were a snob. So much the better, argued John: then they would leave you in peace. But Martha would not consent to this. It was bad for your character, she tried to show him, to hoard yourself like a miser: openness and hospitality were the basis of ancient virtue, like Abraham entertaining the angels, unawares. Abraham was not writing a play, John retorted. For John, the village was an enemy silently waiting to infiltrate as soon as his back was turned. Last week, he had gone up to Boston, to do some research in the library, and came home to find that Martha had let the plumber and his helpers drive their truck over his freshly seeded lawn. It was not her fault, actually: she had heard the truck too late, and opened her study window and screamed at them like a harpy, pointing to John’s barriers and a big “Keep off the Grass” sign. She was proud, for John’s sake, that she had done that much, though the plumber went off in a huff and would not come back to fix the pump he had botched up. He was very sensitive, it seemed, about being a plumber, because he had gone to college, and Martha, the Coes told John, should have thought of that before she yelled, “Can’t you read?”

  Martha was not tactful, despite all her theories of hospitality and neighborliness. She could never remember the things you were supposed to remember about the people up here—who had had a lung removed and who was impotent and who was drinking and who was on the wagon this season. And yet, as she knew, in New Leeds such facts assumed a great importance and even conferred distinction. Right off the bat, she blundered, for example, with the vicomte by offering him coffee and a brandy. “Dear lady,” protested M. de Harnonville, “I am an alcoholic.” How was she expected to know that, she demanded of John later. She hardly knew the vicomte. He had come here after the war, to stay with some moneyed summer people, just before she left Miles. He seemed to know her very well, but all she could remember of him, from that period, was that he was said to be writing his memoirs of the Resistance: his hosts liked to tell how he had been parachuted, disguised as a businessman, back into his native province, where he had worked for the Allies. Martha had thought this remarkable—because he was so fat—and she was greatly surprised to come back, after all these years, and find him still here, a placid institution, like the new high school. His name was on the town roll of honor, in the square, but everybody seemed to have forgotten about the memoirs. Jane Coe, in fact, now claimed to know that he had really spent the war years in New York, acting as a paid courier to rich refugees: a cousin of the Hubers had seen him, she declared. And she added her own cheerful surmise, that he had probably been working for the Germans too—he looked, she thought, a lot like Goering.

  “You oughtn’t to say that, dear,” Warren had interjected mildly, but Jane pooh-poohed his fears. Nobody up here, she said, would mind what Paul had done, not even the FBI, who only cared about Communists now. Why, Hitler himself could come here and set up as a house-painter and nobody would mind; that, in a way, agreed Warren, was the nice part of New Leeds.

  It was the vicomte’s rich air of fraudulence that took Martha’s fancy today; he appealed to her sense of theater. She did not even object to the shoeblacking coming off him; it was a part of his makeup. He sat in the chair like somebody playing the roll of an impostor nobleman, fat, florid, seedy, with a plaintive blue eye—a compendium of myths and history, with his darker pages open, almost ostentatiously. And yet the Coes attested that he was a real vicomte; strangely enough, observed Jane with a toss of her shawl. He had really traveled a great deal, the Coes said, and spoke a great many languages and their dialects. The liquor-store window, in the winter season, was papered with a collection of educational photographs, of the Upper Nile, the Ganges, a Chinese riverboat, a Russian cruiser of the tsar’s day, a fjord, a cork plantation, an American oilfield, in all of which M. de Harnonville was standing, looking exactly the same, and surrounded by a swarm of natives, just as he was here. Yet if he had spent six months, as he claimed, in all the places he had been caught by the camera, he would have to be a hundred and twenty, according to Warren’s count. Jane declared that the answer was simple: Paul, who was probably about sixty, had lived a double life, she said thoughtfully.

  He was a bit of a bore, Jane contended; he talked too much about mon oncle, le duc and society people, whom nobody was interested in, nowadays. But Warren disagreed; he had learned a lot from Paul, he insisted. John, Martha could see, was of Jane’s opinion. He barely concealed a yawn as the vicomte began to relate the history of alcoholism in the Harnonville blood: mon oncle, le duc, it seemed, had been a famous toper. For Martha, however, the vicomte and his uncle were interesting just because she doubted their reality. To call her husband’s attention to this point, she gave a gay little laugh. “I don’t believe it,” she said flatly. The vicomte frowned. “I assure you,” he said. “It is all in the memoirs.” Martha saw that her jesting tone had offended him. “Still,” she persisted, “I never heard that you were a drinker.” The vicomte shrugged. “Oh yes, my dear girl,” he affirmed. “You would not have known me. I was a shocking sight. In the gutter. Six months. Positively.” He began to rummage in his pockets. Martha giggled. She feared, as she told John later, that he was about to produce a snapshot of himself in the gutter, but it was only a cigarette case. He lit a mentholated cigarette, waving aside John’s match. He had, Martha observed, a very bad cigarette cough. “When was this?” she said, skeptically. The vicomte meditated. “Oh . . . during the war . . . I cannot say now the exact date.” Martha was silent. She did not want to press him, rudely, but it was he who had introduced the topic. And she still did not believe him, as she tried to indicate to John, though she could not think why anyone should pose as an alcoholic. The vicomte met her look. “You’re seeking the stigmata?” he said. “Stigmata?” cried Martha, alarmed; she suddenly remembered hearing that the vicomte was très catholique. “The signs,” said the vicomte, with an air of impatience. “The signs of alcoholism.” Martha nodded. “They are there,” he assured her. “My doctor could tell you. The blood sugar is never the same.” “But you don’t drink any more?” “No,” said the vicomte. He pulled himself out of his chair and selected a small bronze from the mantel, turned it around, and set it back in silence.

  “It must be hard on you, working in the liquor store,” said Martha, at a loss for another topic and getting no help from her husband, who sat looking intently at the vicomte now, as if the old fellow were a foreign particle that had intruded on his field of vision for the first time. “ ’Ard?” said the vicomte, blinking. Martha repeated her remark in a louder voice. M. de Harnonville turned wonderingly to John. “My wife means the temptation.” “Ah,” said the vicomte. “But that is part of our method.” “ ‘Our’?” queried Martha, uneasily mindful again of the vicomte’s religion; John was a perfect Roundhead who held popery in aversion. “A. A.,” said the vicomte. “You know what it is?” “Alcoholics Anonymous,” chorused the Sinnotts. The vicomte nodded. “A wonderful society,” he said. “Truly missionary. In the spirit of Vincent de Paul. I give them what little time I have here. They call me and I come. It is very moving. Last week, in the woods, a little girl, abandoned by her husband—oh, la pauvre.”

  He bowed his head. “Isn’t there a clash of interests?” said John, with a cold little laugh. He disapproved of Martha’s taste for pious frauds and he refused, despite all her merry glances, to find the vicomte amusing. “Interests?” repeated the vicomte, picking up a little china figure, replacing it, and shading his eyes frowningly against the afternoon sun. “He means the interests of your work in the liquor store as against the interests of your work in A. A.,” interpreted Martha. “But where is the problem?” said the vicomte, resuming his chair. “As an alcoholic, I know wines and whiskeys very well.” Martha opened her mouth to explain further, but at John’s impatient signal she closed it again. “Besides,” mused M. de Harnonville, in a franker tone, “it is like the pleasures of the eye and the hand for a man who is past the age for the other. . . . A little perversion, I suppos
e.” He tilted his big bobbed head. Martha jumped up. “Let me take that,” she said and hurried out with the empty custard cup to the kitchen.

  Left alone with John, the vicomte leaned back in his chair and looked shrewdly at the tall young man opposite him, in white shirtsleeves and black sleeveless sweater, perched rather nervously on the black sofa. “I understand you very well,” he said, unexpectedly. “You are a young American, of good family; very high-principled, like your wife. You are thinking of la question morale. But you must remember that ‘moral’ in French has a somewhat different meaning.” He got up and went to the window, where he stood looking out onto the lawn, with his arms behind his back. “You should prune that rose tree,” he observed. Under his authoritative stare, John felt their property blanch; the sandy patches on the lawn grew bigger and whiter; the box withered; briars raised their stalks. “If you fix it, it will be very nice,” he heard the vicomte sum up. “But it will cost you $20,000—a fortune.” The old man shrugged and turned away from the window. “We like it shabby,” protested Martha, in the doorway, seeing her husband’s woeful face. The vicomte threw out his hands and gave a short laugh. “Chacun à son goût,” he conceded.