Mary McCarthy

by Mary McCarthy

  “Excuse me,” ventured Warren. “But how do you reconcile your religion with what we were just talking about? I mean, that card you wanted to give me. I thought you Catholics were against that sort of thing.” “Officially—ça va sans dire,” said the vicomte. “But I am not the church, my dear Warren. I am only one poor sinner. I believe in works of charity. Here is a poor Jew in Boston who is deprived of his means of livelihood. It is only a work of charity to put him in touch with a poor girl who will be disgraced if she bears a fatherless child. The church frowns, but God is merciful. He winks, I think, at such cases. I commit a little sin, but God will forgive me, probably. I do not pretend to know. Only God knows what he will do with my soul. I will have to wait and find out. I am not in a hurry.” “That’s awfully interesting,” said Warren. “Do you really believe in a life after death?” “Naturally,” said the vicomte, with an air of astonishment. “I am a Catholic.” “But how do you reconcile that—?” “Reconcile, reconcile,” pronounced the vicomte, impatiently. “That is all I hear from you atheists and Protestants. ‘Paul, how do you reconcile . . . ?’ I do not need to reconcile; I leave that to God. On earth, I am agnostic, though I keep the sacraments. In Heaven, I will be a believer, for then the meaning will be revealed to me. In Hell, if I am sent there, I will have to believe too; that will be my punishment, to know that I am a scoundrel for all eternity.” He sighed. “What is the expression? It will all come out in the wash.” He looked at his watch; it was time to open the liquor store. Warren followed him out of the shop.

  Three days later, in the waning afternoon, John Sinnott sat in Martha’s study, trembling with anger. The front door had just banged; she was hurrying down the hill to the garage. For the first time in months, they had had a violent quarrel. Martha had provoked it, deliberately, out of nothing. The phone had rung while she was typing out her manuscript, and she had jumped up to answer it, though he had told her over and over to leave the phone calls to him, when he was in the house. It was never anything important enough to justify her interrupting her work, especially now when she was almost finished. She had promised to let him read the play before she went to Boston, the day after tomorrow. But she would not have it ready if she kept jumping up and down. This time, it was only Warren on the phone, with an invitation to tea, which Martha immediately shrilled at him to accept, though they were already committed to have dinner with the Hubers. One invitation a day, they had agreed, was enough; there was no reason why they could not see the Coes tomorrow instead. But Martha had flown into a passion when he, paying no attention to her, told Warren to make it tomorrow. “You don’t have to go if you don’t want to, but I’m going,” she had breathed, defiantly, snatching the telephone from him to tell Warren she would come, alone.

  This frantic avidity for social life seemed disgusting to John; it was unworthy of Martha. If she could have seen how her pretty face looked, contorted with rage and terror at the idea of missing a social engagement, she would have bowed her head in shame. Beside himself, suddenly, John had tried to force her to look at herself in the long mirror in the parlor. But she had twisted out of his grasp and fled to the bedroom. It was the nearest they had ever come to blows, and he had felt instantly sickened. Half remorseful and half sullen, he had waited for her to make up with him. But when she came out of the bedroom, finally, all dressed, she said she was sorry yet she made no effort to coax him to come to the Coes’ with her. In fact, he got the impression that she was secretly glad to be rid of his company. She was itching to be off, and when he pointed out that there was no hurry, that if she would wait, while he dressed and shaved, they could stop in at the Coes’ for a minute, on the way to the Hubers’, Martha said coldly, “I don’t want to wait for you. You always take so long.” His anger had risen again. It was almost dark, already, and she was not a good driver; he hated to have her take the car over these roads at night. “I’ll come back for you,” she said, “in time to start for dinner.” And now that she had made sure he was not coming, she had reached up to give him a kiss. “I know it’s dull for you,” she murmured, “listening to me and Warren.” “Go on,” he said icily, pushing her away. “Enjoy yourself. I bore you. I ‘always take so long.’ ”

  Then the door banged, and he had rushed furiously into her writing room, minded to do something destructive. He pulled her manuscript page out of the typewriter, flung it to the floor, and started to type out the heading of a letter. He was going to write to the real-estate agent to put the house on the market. When Martha came back, she would find him packed to leave. He was not going to dinner with the Hubers under any circumstances. Martha had been too peculiar lately, running off to visit people the minute he was gone, complaining of being ill and then insisting she was well again, wanting to go to Boston, and dropping into fits of abstraction several times a day. She had even, Dolly had told him in confidence, tried to borrow some money from her. And now she could not wait a minute while he changed his clothes and shaved. The sound of his electric razor irritated her, probably, though she had delighted in it when she had first known him, as a contrast to Miles’s lather and old Gillette. All this restlessness must mean that she was finally tired of him; after seven years, he was no longer a novelty for her. What she really wanted, probably, though she did not know it, was a new man. The thing they had always said, about the seven-year term, was true. He could tell it himself. As his anger subsided, and he could examine his feelings for her, he discovered only an emptiness, a great hollow of disappointment. He could see her virtues, objectively, but they did not speak to him any more; another man, who did not know her as he did, might find her attractive and winning. He picked up the manuscript sheet from the floor and carefully smoothed it, glancing idly at the lines of dialogue. The temptation to read her play, to punish her, was very strong for a minute, but he set it aside. It would not be fair to read it, when he felt so sad about her. He added the sheet to the pile of manuscript on the writing-table.

  Just then the door opened, and Martha appeared. She hurried across the small room and flung her arms around him. “I love you,” she said. “You were thinking I didn’t.” John nodded somberly. “I couldn’t go off and leave you thinking that,” she said. They looked at each other steadily. “I really do,” she said. Her eye fell on the typewriter and traveled to her manuscript. She mistily smiled. “You were going to read my play, to get back at me,” she announced. John laughed unwillingly. “I thought of it,” he admitted. “But you couldn’t be so cruel,” she said reproachfully. “No,” he agreed. “I can’t hurt you, Martha. You’re too vulnerable.” He put his arm around her, lightly, resigned to this fact. “And is that such a deprivation?” she asked, with a faintly quizzical look. “Yes,” he said, speaking honestly. “I’d like to feel free to hurt you.” “How strange,” said Martha, thoughtfully. “That’s very different from me. But I can see how it might be dreadful, never to be able to hurt somebody, like a horse being hobbled. That’s why you feel so shackled. It must make you hate me.” “Sometimes,” he confessed. Martha hesitated. “If I gave you good reason to hate me, would it help, would you feel liberated from these constrictions?” “Possibly,” said John, dryly. She gave him a very searching look and sighed. He distinctly read her thoughts. Her poetical temperament was wondering whether she could “drive him away” from her, like some great tragic heroine, while her prosaic self balked, like a little mule. He laughed. This conscientious transparency of Martha’s was why he could not hurt her. “Go along,” he said, and Martha went, with a troubled backward glance.

  He sat staring mechanically at the sheet of paper in the typewriter, on which he had written the date. All at once, everything was clear to him. He had the clue to Martha’s strange behavior. It was December, and she was thinking about Christmas. That was why she was going to Boston; that was why she had tried to borrow money from Dolly. She set foolish feminine store by anniversaries and holidays and loved to prepare surprises. She had been sad and abstracted lately because they were
short of money and because she was determined, nevertheless, to buy him some extravagant, absurd Christmas present. Their first Christmas in their new house! That was precisely how Martha would think of it. She had made herself sick with worrying over her romantic contrivances; that was probably what had been wrong with her stomach. And now, undoubtedly, she had some scheme cooked up with the Coes, which was why she had been in such a hurry to answer the phone and to go off there, herself, without him.

  He was torn between relief and exasperation. It lightened his spirits to realize that Christmas was the only thing that was the matter with Martha. At the same time, he could have screamed at how typical this was of her. She had always made a fuss over Christmas. In their little apartment in New York, they had always had a Scandinavian-style Christmas tree, with round Swedish cookies and colored candies and gingerbread men and walnuts gilded by Martha, and real candles, of course, burning in holders that had belonged to her grandmother and had been sent on, from Alaska, when her mother died. It had been extremely pretty, but dangerous; their apartment was a firetrap, and whenever the tree was lit he had had to stand by with a bucket of water and a fire-extinguisher, which Martha laughed at. And the candies and cookies on the tree invariably attracted mice; she insisted on keeping the tree up until Twelfth Night. There were always heaps of presents, expensive ones, from the very best shops. She rejoiced in having things specially made for him. And there was always a Christmas dinner party, with a goose and snappers for the guests. He could not deny that he liked this passionate festivity, but only because of her, because it transported him into the northern fairy world of her childhood, with real elk and reindeer and icicles. But he did not care at all about getting presents. This year, her play would be present enough, if she gave it to him in manuscript covers, with a dedication. He had told her this months ago, and she had agreed, but now she had gone back on her word, obviously, and was borrowing money they could not afford to give him something he did not want. He wondered, irritably, what it was she had in mind. An expensive phonograph, perhaps, like the one the Coes owned? Or some foreign books bound specially in violet bindings? Or could she be thinking (he shuddered) of giving him heat for Christmas, so that he would not have to fix the fires and the stoves? John shook his head; that was not quite right. Martha always preferred to give something solid, that could be opened under the tree.

  And what was he to do? To stop this folly, peremptorily, or let her have her way and pretend not to notice what she was up to? She would grieve if he prevented her. For Martha, a bare Christmas would immediately become symbolic of the notion that their love had fled. He remembered, now, certain mournful, deep looks she had been casting at him, when she thought he was not observing her. These looks he could now decipher; they meant that she was being sorry for him because she had not yet thought up a way of getting money for his Christmas. Her obstinate, childish heart refused to learn that he was really indifferent to such things. It was only with her brain that she philosophized. A rueful tenderness plucked at his sleeve. Martha’s dreams and discontents, her plans and projects, were those of a young girl, whom he could still picture, on roller skates, with her book-strap. To her, reality still spoke a “little language,” like the language of the flowers, or of precious stones or apple seeds. Sooner or later, she would have to grow up, he reflected, but in a way he would be sorry to see it. The child in him, even in anticipation, fought against losing its playmate. Would he accept a “womanly woman,” calm as a Roman matron, in exchange for this precocious, learned, bold sister, who was always outshining the other pupils, thinking rings around them, as Dolly had once said, describing Martha in the classroom? For some reason, John suddenly felt melancholy grip him, like a pain in the heart. He saw them all as children, like babies pickled in bottles: Warren, a wizened boy, Jane a middle-aged schoolgirl in bloomers, Dolly, prim, in a hockey dress, himself on a rocking-horse charger, Martha. He put a fresh piece of paper in the typewriter and wrote: “Martha, I love you, but life is serious. You must not spend any money on Christmas.” He drew a heart and signed his name. She would find it in her typewriter in the morning.

  Martha had the money in her pocketbook, and the name of a doctor in Boston, which Warren had written out for her. She was in an exalted mood. The night was bright and starry, though there was no moon. She was almost at the end of the ordeal, she said to herself calmly and joyfully as she backed out of the Coes’ driveway, with Warren’s flashlight beaming “Good luck” at her. They had urged her to stay and have cocktails with Eleanor Considine, the local poetess, who was coming to have dinner with them. But she wanted to get back to John. Eleanor Considine, a woman of fifty, with dyed red hair and a long amatory history, was a cautionary example of everything Martha was trying not to be. She had run away from a conventional husband, out west in Cincinnati, and married a young man, who had died of tetanus, all alone, in Mexico, from a cut she had neglected to have attended to. She had been married again several times, once to her original husband, who supported the several children she had picked up en route. She was now after the vicomte, who could give her a title, she said; she had set her cap for Miles and gone to him as a patient, after Martha had left him. Nothing fazed Eleanor, as her friends delightedly remarked. She had a rough, ringing laugh and an artless, witty candor; she confessed her misdemeanors to everyone, on first acquaintance; her truthfulness excused her, it was commonly felt. And she was always scribbling something, plays in verse, mock epics, love poems, elegiacs, vers de société; when she was on the wagon, she came to parties with a notebook in which she took down the conversation. Like Martha, she had a good ear, and many people still nervously agreed that she might do something eventually, even while they smiled at her pretensions to seriousness. But she insisted on regarding Martha as a rival, and Martha did not want to see her, even though, as the Coes said, she was getting old and deserved pity.

  Tonight Martha could not tolerate the presence of anything petty. She was very much moved by what Warren had done for her. All she had heard from Warren, until today’s telephone call, was a hurried injunction to stand by: the money would be coming. Just now, while Jane was in the kitchen, he had related to her in an undertone the events of the past seventy-two hours. A gentle pride had emanated from Warren: he was proud of his aunt’s husband, proud of the vicomte, proud of his own subtlety in eliciting the name and address of the doctor, proud, even, in a curious way, of Miles, for behaving so terribly. Everybody, including Miles, had been prodigious.

  This was what Martha felt herself, a sort of wondering gratitude, not only to Warren personally but to life itself, which suddenly revealed a new dimension, like Warren’s outer space, beyond the shining galaxies. She could not help thinking that she was in the presence of the sublime, which was of course the verge of the ridiculous. Happiness misted her eyes as she drove along the sand road; a hymn tune came to her lips. Despite the doctor’s caution, she was not in the least afraid. Abortionists, she had always heard, did their task much more proficiently than licensed doctors, and why shouldn’t they—they had more practice at it. In two days, it would be over. After it was over, she might possibly tell John. Perhaps she owed him the truth, so that he could hate her if he chose to. For a moment, back in her writing room, she had almost spoken. But now, with her mind very clear, she saw this impulse as sentimentality. Once it was all over, John would not hate her for what she had done; in fact, he would admire her resolution and fortitude. The only person he would hate would be Miles. Therefore, there was no reason to tell him unless she wanted praise at the price of peace in the community. Yet it would be good to have truth between them again.

  In any case, she did not have to decide yet, and however she decided, it would be all right. She suddenly knew this, without knowing how she knew it. But it was an unmistakable certainty. In a matter like that, she could trust herself. For the first time in years, since the summer she had married Miles, she could say this aloud. She said it, and her wonder grew. She had changed;
she was no longer afraid of herself. That was the reward of that fearsome decision, which no longer seemed fearsome, now that it was behind her. She laughed and stepped on the gas. “Integer vitae, scelerisque purus,” she sang, thinking of Warren. Around a blind curve ahead, she saw the faint reflection of the headlights of a car, coming rapidly toward her: Eleanor Considine, doubtless. Martha slowed down and hugged her own side of the road. As the car crashed into her and she heard a shower of glass, she knew, in a wild flash of humor, that she had made a fatal mistake: in New Leeds, after sundown, she would have been safer on the wrong side of the road. “Killed instantly,” she said to herself, regretfully, as she lost consciousness. This succinct appraisal, in the wavy blackness, became a point of light receding until she could find it no more.

  STORIES FROM

  CAST A COLD EYE

  The Weeds

  SHE WOULD leave him, she thought, as soon as the petunias had bloomed. With a decisive feeling of happiness, she set down her trowel and sank back on her heels to rest. Around her lay the brown earth of the converted vegetable garden, a slightly lopsided rectangle, across which careened the flower seedlings in rows that were both neat and unsteady, so that the whole planting, seen from a distance, looked like a letter written by a child who has lost his ruler. If only, she reflected, she had done it the way the book said and marked out the rows with stakes and string. Next year . . . Her heart turned over with horror as she perceived the destination of her thought. She had done it again. Next year, of course, she would not be here. She had been telling herself this for five weeks, yet she could not seem to remember it. Left to itself, her idle mind reached out lazily, unthinkingly, for a plan, as doubtless Persephone’s hand had strayed toward a pomegranate seed.