Mary McCarthy

by Mary McCarthy

  Having nerved herself for this, she was conscious, chiefly, of gratitude when Dolly broke the bad news to her before the first, faltering sentence was fully out of her mouth. She would not have to tell now, thanks be to Heaven. Sandy Gray had been ahead of her. It was Dolly who went red with embarrassment, as though she were making a confession. She had been “helping” Sandy with some improvements in his house. He was putting in heat, for Ellen, who was coming back in a few weeks. Dolly had had to apply to her trustees for an advance. Martha inwardly, so to speak, raised her eyebrows. She and John had had an estimate on heat. Sandy, she calculated, must have nicked Dolly for five hundred dollars, at the very least, if he was only having a floor furnace. She could not but admire his audacity, even while she froze with terror at what this meant for her own predicament. Her mind seemed to split in two, as if she were under an anesthetic that permitted her to watch herself being operated on without feeling any sensation. One part of her was perfectly motionless; the other was listening to Dolly and storing up details and her own commentary, to give John as soon as she got home.

  Ellen, she said to herself, impatiently. Ellen will never come back to him. Ellen, in actual fact, if Dolly only knew, was coming back here to stay with the Hubers. Martha had had it from the vicomte, whom she had met just now in the post office. Ellen’s return, according to the vicomte, had a purely commercial motive. Her alimony had been cut off, finally, and she was bringing back some Mexican tin bric-a-brac for him to sell. Her hope was to get the Hubers to set her up in a shop of her own, selling Mexican wares to the summer trade. She had found a man in Laredo who would help her smuggle things across the border. The vicomte, who was usually so bland, had turned very malicious this noon. The Hubers were his pigeon. He followed Martha out to the parking space, sprinkling libels as he went, like a fat priest with an aspergill. Had Martha heard about the custody case? Did her friend know Sandy Gray was impotent? Martha made a motion of disbelief. “Oh yes, my dear girl, positively,” the vicomte assured her, with a cough. He had had it, he attested, from Margery at the grille.

  This bit of gossip was printed on Martha’s mind as though in blurred type. Warming herself by Dolly’s kerosene heater (a new acquisition, she noted absently), she tried to feel concern for what was happening to her friend. Dolly looked badly, very peaked and worn. Her little breasts seemed sunken under her pale-blue shirt and black sweater. Her eyes were sunk back too, and that bright, inflamed look, as though she had just been crying or having her cheeks scrubbed by an angry nursegirl, had become almost too real. Outside, it was a beautiful day, one of those extraordinary days in November, in which the pale-blue sky and the pines reflected in the ponds created a tropical illusion, of palms and blue lagoons. Dolly should have been out painting, but she stood, hugging herself by the stove, with a lackluster air, like a shut-in. Her collections of seashells and fish skeletons had been dismantled; a bunch of cattails stood awry in a milk bottle. The sun’s rays showed crumbs on the table. In the kitchen, through the open door, Martha could see a gallon jug, half empty, of the vicomte’s cheapest white California. A slight smell of wine was noticeable on Dolly’s breath. She had been giving Sandy lunch, she said, as if explaining herself. He was not working at the scallop place any more. He was trying to write an article.

  Martha nodded stiffly. Her affective side was not working. She had dragged poor Dolly down; they were both submerging in a horrible quicksand. But this perception sent no message to her sympathies. She could only note and wonder. Her main sensation was one of constraint, which she tried to cover with a manner of formal politeness. Sandy had a writing block, Dolly was saying. “What is he doing?” Martha brought out, with an effort. In her present state, it hardly surprised her to hear that Sandy was supposed to be “discovering” Warren Coe for a women’s fashion magazine. Miles had fixed it up. At the mention of Miles’s name, Martha felt herself blanch. “Oh?” she said, smiling painfully. Yes, Dolly went on, with brightening eyes. Miles had been splendid. He had such immense energy. He had persuaded Sandy that the time had arrived for him to make his come-back as an art critic. He had sold Sandy and the article in a single, forceful long-distance call. Dolly could see that he must have been a very good editor. He had even managed to get Sandy a small advance.

  Ridiculous as it was under the circumstances, Martha immediately felt jealousy of Miles. “Yes,” she said curtly. “Miles is very enterprising. He should have been a salesman.” “Oh, Martha,” said Dolly, sadly. “He likes you, really. He asked a lot about you and seemed concerned about how you were.” Dolly’s coaxing look, pleading with Martha to soften, made Martha tremble with a sense of injustice and betrayal. The vision of Miles, magnanimous, and Dolly, talking her over, was really too much. “Go on,” she said tensely. But that was all there was to it; Dolly had seen Miles and he had asked how Martha was. It had come up because they were looking at the portrait. Sandy had wanted Dolly to see it again and take some notes; she was helping him with the article. She was doing the first draft now, to get him started, and then Sandy was going to go over it and put in the ideas.

  A peal of genuine, incredulous laughter came from Martha. “Dolly!” she began, in fond exasperation. Her voice fell abruptly silent, as a wave of panic struck her. That was the way it had been taking her, during the past few days, in waves, like assault troops. It had happened in the parking area while the vicomte was talking. The reality suddenly grasped her and picked her up and pounded her, like a roller on the beach. But this time it was much worse, for up to now she had had the thought of Dolly to fall back on. It was only now that she fully realized that she would have to go home empty-handed. “Are you feeling sick?” she heard Dolly cry. Martha shook her head and pulled herself to her feet. “No,” she said. “I just remembered something. I have to go now.” They walked to the door. “It’s a beautiful day, don’t you think?” said Martha, gazing down at the pond. “What did you want the money for?” Dolly suddenly asked. “Nothing,” said Martha. “I’ll tell you some time. It was just one of my ‘ideas.’ Don’t tell John I asked you.” “Is it the mortgage?” said Dolly, with a face of concern. “If you could get them to wait till next month. . . .” “No,” said Martha. “Nothing like that. It was only something I wanted. Don’t worry.” Martha’s natural honesty made it hard for her to hide the fact that something was indeed the matter. But it would be only weakness, she reflected, to tell Dolly now, when there was nothing Dolly could do. To keep herself from giving way, Martha spoke in a dry, half-satirical, almost unpleasant manner that Dolly took as a rebuff. “I’m awfully sorry,” she muttered. “If you’d only asked me first.” “Never mind,” said Martha, warmly. The thought that she was still preferred to Sandy Gray made her feel momentarily better.

  That night, for the first time, she could not get to sleep. She lay rigid, thinking, without hitting on a single idea that seemed feasible for more than the instant it took to turn it over. How was she to get the money when there was no one up here she dared tell? Her friends in New York seemed too far away, and she was afraid to use the mails lest a letter fall into John’s hands. Moreover, she had no excuse for going to New York in person. Boston was different. With her adaptation opening in Cambridge, John, she had decided, would not be too surprised if she announced that she was going up to see the final rehearsals. Her own play was almost finished; her spurt of work last week had accomplished miracles. There was one rough spot in the first act left to polish and then she would be done. That was the awful irony of the position. Their purposes in coming to New Leeds had been fulfilled; her play was done, more or less, and she was pregnant. It was like a fairy tale, in which you got your wish, but in such a way that you wished you had not wished it.

  Yet out of this recognition issued a new temptation or rather the same one in a “higher” form. When fate, in the shape of Dolly, refused her the money, was this not to be understood as an order to accept what had happened and submit her soul in peace? In straining after an abortion, was she not se
eking the impossible: to undo the past? That was precisely her criticism of the people here in New Leeds, the Sandy Grays et al. They refused to acknowledge the reality of the past; they were not accountable for their actions. In her case, to be accountable would be to have the baby.

  Her head turned restively on the pillow. No, she said to herself. The past could be undone, in certain conditions. It could be bought back, paid for by suffering. That is, it could be redeemed. The money she had somehow to get was a material token of the price she had to pay for having the past obliterated. Or for having its consequences obliterated; the past itself was indelible. If suffering was the real coin demanded, there could be no doubt, Martha considered, that a genuine transaction was taking place. She was suffering horribly, more than she could have imagined possible. She felt completely exhausted by the struggle that was going on, not so much in her as on her, as though she were a battlefield torn by conflicting forces. Every time ground was gained in one place, the action started up in a new spot. Her taut muscles ached, with the effort of lying still, so that John would not sense that she was wakeful. Her head ached; her heart pounded. This very weariness and malaise gave rise to false hopes. A tempter’s voice hinted that she might have a miscarriage if she merely kept on agonizing and took no positive steps; miscarriages ran in her family—her mother had had several.

  It was the reasoning power of the adversary that she found most intolerable. She was almost ready to have the baby, to put a stop to this arguing. She felt as though she were present, against her will, at an interminable discussion. It was like a night at the Coes’ raised to a pitch of delirium, with captious voices pleading, “Explain to me, why not? Give me one reason why not.” The medieval temptations, with all the allures of gluttony and concupiscence could not, Martha thought, have been half so trying as the sheer dentist-drill boredom of listening to the arguments of the devil as a modern quasi-intellectual. Under this badgering, she could not prove she was right, while the devil had proofs innumerable that she was wrong. That was how she knew he was the devil, but she was too tired to demonstrate that. He made chains of propositions; he argued from statistics and from norms and from social history. A Whig lady told her that she was being middle-class: it was vulgar to worry about the paternity of one’s children. The vicomte coughed. Sandy Gray announced that she was not “a real woman,” in his glowering, miasmal voice. Miles told her she did not really want a baby and was using this pretext to get rid of it.

  In this awful din, Martha found herself reciting phrases from the Bible and from literature. “Father, let this cup pass from me.” “All may yet be well.” “And is there one who understands me?” Lying beside John, she was conscious of her utter solitude. He was the only one who could divine what she was going through, and he was the only one, alas, in whom she could not confide. She pressed herself close to him, feeling his heartbeat, and wept.

  The next afternoon, as soon as John was gone, she started walking rapidly to the Coes’. It was her only chance to see Warren alone. John would be away for several hours, photographing a house down the peninsula for a new piece he was doing on carpenter Gothic. Jane was away too; she had gone to Trowbridge to the dentist. Despite her determination, Martha was nervous. When the Western Union man gave her a lift part way, she had the feeling that she was being hurried onstage before she was ready. She felt suddenly shy of asking Warren because of Miles’s “discovering” him. It seemed to her, now, that she should have thought of this herself. Warren was a much better friend of hers than he was of Miles. Why had it never crossed her mind to do something for him? She and John knew editors too. Comparing herself to Miles, she felt that she must appear ungenerous. It was true that once or twice she had tried to awaken some interest in Warren’s work among young art critics of the Eighth Street circle, but she had not pursued the effort when she met with no response. Her excuse had been that she was not sure enough of her own opinion. Miles was too grand for such details.

  “Let the public decide,” was what he had told Warren, it seemed. She found Warren in his studio, with a mourning band on his corduroy sleeve, sitting on the broken sofa in a state of despondency. Contrary to what Martha had expected, he was not at all pleased with Miles’s activities on his behalf. His easel stood empty. He had not been able to work, he said, for nearly a week. He did not want to be discovered yet. He was not ready for it. It threw off all his calculations. And it had opened a gulf, he confided, between him and Jane. Jane, being a woman, was pleased as Punch, naturally. They had been spatting for days. He saw Jane’s side of it, but Jane did not see his. Miles said the magazine was going to send a photographer, which meant that Warren would have to take all his work out of storage and notify the insurance company. That was only a bother. He could get a man to help him clear out the studio to make room for the paintings; the old bicycles and the washing machine and the deep-freeze and the dishwasher could stay outside, for the time being, under a tarpaulin.

  The worst was having to choose what paintings he wanted reproduced. Jane did not realize the seriousness of that. It involved a revaluation of his whole artistic development. To do that honestly, the way it ought to be done, would require six weeks of solid thinking. And just now he had started on a new phase; something the Lamb girl said had set him off. He did not want to interrupt himself to think about his past work. If he were really honest, he might want to reject his past completely.

  “You can’t reject the past,” said Martha, in a somber voice. “You don’t think so?” cried Warren eagerly, brushing off a chair for her to sit on. “Explain that a little, will you?” Martha smiled and sighed. “Not now,” she said. “Another time.” Warren’s blue eyes were full of hungry disappointment. Martha made an effort; this, she reminded herself, was very important to Warren. “I think Miles is right,” she said carefully. “Let the public decide. Pick out an assortment of the things you think are best, in their own terms. The public may like a style you don’t like at all now. But you can’t help that. It wouldn’t be fair not to show them. That was you once.”

  Warren nodded. “Jane says the fission ones are too dark to reproduce well technically. How do you feel about that?” “They are dark,” assented Martha, without interest. Warren leaned forward. “But Miles thinks I should put the emphasis on the fission series. On account of your portrait, I can understand that, of course. But the funny part is, now that that phase is behind me, I feel further away from it than I do from my middle period.” He waited. “That’s only natural,” said Martha, aware that she was supposed to comment. “Is it really?” cried Warren. “Of course,” said Martha. “In the theater, I always hated my last performance.” Warren sat very still. “I hate to remind you, Martha, but you told me just the opposite a few years ago. Then you said every artist likes his latest work best, like a mother with her youngest child.” “Oh,” said Martha. “Did I? Yes, I remember.” Actually, what she recalled saying was that an artist liked his weakest work best, but she did not want to repeat this on the present occasion. It shocked her a little to realize that, having come to borrow money from Warren, she was only dishing up what she thought he would like to hear.

  If he knew this, he would be cast into despair. He was very much upset because Sandy, who was doing the article, had not even come around to look at his recent painting. “How can he write about me when he doesn’t know what I’m doing now?” Martha laughed. As always, with Warren, she found herself amused and interested, despite herself. He appealed to her didactic instinct; she could not resist setting him straight. “It really doesn’t matter,” she now told him, half severely, “what Sandy says, as long as he praises you. You mustn’t expect anything more. I learned that in the theater.” Warren looked horrified. “But that’s just ‘puffing,’ ” he exclaimed. “I can’t lend myself to a thing like that. I was counting on some real criticism.” Martha grew impatient. “Don’t be greedy,” she said. “The main thing is for your pictures to be seen. They’ll never be seen if you sit here hungerin
g for the ideal disinterested critic to come and discover you. Take what you can get.”

  Warren’s eyes dilated. “I’d rather wait till I’m dead,” he said. “That’s what I’ve been telling Jane. I don’t want to be recognized in my lifetime. I know that now. My work is here. Some day, perhaps, somebody will find it and value it.” Martha caught her breath. Warren’s small figure was tense; he held his clasped hands aloft; a noble fire flashed from his eyes. Perhaps, she said to herself, this ridiculous, rapt person will really turn out to have been a great artist, and we are all too earthbound to see it. “But why, Warren?” she said gently. “The man who finds you in the future may be a fake too, like Sandy Gray. There’s no reason to think that the breed of art critics has been improving.” “That’s not the point,” said Warren. “I’ll be beyond it then. And I won’t be influenced in my work by what the public sees in me. That’s what I’m afraid of. Of starting to copy myself, like Picasso, because one of my styles catches on.”

  “That’s a danger,” admitted Martha, gravely. “But if you’re brave enough to paint all alone and wait for posterity, you ought to be brave enough to risk being influenced by the public’s response. Every artist faces that problem. Some master it.” Warren shook his head. “I might not be one of those,” he said simply. “But you have to take that risk,” argued Martha. “You’re creating a set of very artificial conditions here.” She waved her hand about the studio, with its derelict machines. “You might as well be painting in a time-capsule. That can’t be right for your work. An artist has to have some reality-check. If you don’t get it from nature, you have to turn to an audience.” But Warren insisted that he was only interested in his own inner development; what happened outside, he had concluded, was just static.