Mary McCarthy

by Mary McCarthy

  The voice, screaming, was familiar too; it was, of course, Sunny’s. “You horrible, horrible children,” she repeated, her r’s trilling out in a kind of reflex of gentility. The children turned and ran, and she pursued them to the stairs, a trembling figure of terrible malevolence, in whom could be discerned, as in a triple exposure, traces of the gracious hostess and the frolicsome puppet.

  From behind the curtains came someone to seize her. A man from the box office ran down the aisle to pacify the teacher, who, now seeing herself on firm ground, was repeating over and over again, “That is no way to talk to a child.” The audience did not wait to see the outcome. In shame and silence, it fled out into the rain, pursued by the sound of weeping which intermingled with the word child, as pronounced by the teacher in a tone of peculiar piety and reverence, her voice genuflecting to it as though to the Host.

  The Appalachian Revolution

  IN JULY, the first week, the psychiatrists came. A heavy black car with a black-and-orange license plate appeared on the dirt road to the lake, known as Mirror Lake on the road map but always spoken of by the natives and the “old” summer people as Poor Farm Pond. The car hesitated for a moment at the trampled clearing in the bushes where a number of dusty station wagons and shabby sedans and convertibles and a trailer were already parked. On the small strip of muddied beach at the road’s left, a group of young matrons and their children sat, not moving a muscle; behind the bushes, in the meadow, a young couple, sunbathing, raised their heads and let them drop back in disgusted unison. A curtain twitched in the trailer. In the water, a rowboat manned by a small, curly-haired boy came to a halt as the rower stared darkly at the car, whose engine made the only sound in the bristling silence. It was as if Poor Farm Pond were holding its breath, beseeching the intruders to pass on. But the big car was deaf to entreaty; a mop of gray hair protruded from the window by the driver’s seat and nodded with commanding emphasis to another car, behind. The horn tooted, “Doctor, here is the place.”

  On the beach, the young mothers sighed and reached for their cigarettes. The new cars always hesitated and always concluded this was the place. If (unlike these latest arrivals) the occupants were well mannered, they called out to ask whether the beach was private, as evidently it was; you could tell from the old green rowboats drawn up on the shore and the little fishing hut and the kayak that the place must belong to somebody. But you could not refuse them, even when they paid you the courtesy of asking. The young mothers were accustomed to reply, in their soft, anxious, scrupled voices, that the beach was private but that the owner would not mind, probably, if the new people swam there. Whereupon the new people, already dressed in bathing suits, would park their car at an awkward angle and, pantomiming thankfulness, heat, exhaustion, plunge into the water, stirring up the bottom, while the children looked on coldly and angrily, sometimes groaning aloud, until the mothers shushed them. “Why did you tell them they could, Mother, for heaven’s sake?” the adolescent girls would wail when the newcomers had struck out for the middle, and the young mothers, noble Romans, would answer with simple dignity, “You must remember, it doesn’t belong to us either, dear.”

  But this statuesque reminder did not express the felt truth, which was that the beach did belong to Us, for the group of young mothers had been coming here ever so long, with the owner’s permission—since Mother’s or Grandmother’s day, in many cases, right back almost to the time when the tall, tumbling house up the road, with its old raspberry patch, had been the town poor farm. And it was they, the young mothers and their husbands and occasional house guests, who had made the place a beach. Before they came, the bottom had just been mud and slippery brown leaves, like the rest of the lake’s margin; they had imported the sand. Every summer, they conscientiously laid down a new load of it, and every summer, on the first warm weekend, one of the husbands and some of the prep-school boy cousins would go and find the old raft, at the other end of the lake, where it had drifted to during the winter, and tow it back to the beach and moor it, so that the children could dive. So they did have the right to say no, as the children begged them to do, but they did not have the temerity or the cruelty to, especially since Lodestone Pond, where the natives and the French Canadians from the nearby granite town had been swimming from time immemorial, had been taken over by the beavers.

  There were other places, admittedly, even now, for the public to patronize, but either they were marshy or stony or froggy or had bloodsuckers or you had to pay to park there or pay to be rowed out to the middle. This spot on Poor Farm Pond, thanks to the work that had gone into it, was something pretty enviable in a region where the swimming was nothing to boast about. There was really quite a problem. The young mothers and their husbands had discussed it until they were sickened by the subject. Their mothers, the grandmothers, crisply advised them to take action—buy the place and put up “No Trespassing” signs and a fence. But that, smiled the young mothers sadly, was a different generation talking. Few would criticize the grandmothers for putting up “No Trespassing” signs, or even a fence, because the grandmothers, like the children, did not know any better; they had not gone to Vassar or Bryn Mawr. And in any case the owner, who was elderly and deaf and peculiar, had no inclination to sell. A year ago, one of the husbands had approached him with a tentative offer, but the old man had misunderstood. “Use it, use it!” he had shouted benevolently in his flat, deaf voice. “You folks have always used it.” And whenever he drove by, on a Sunday, in his new Buick, and saw a crowd of people in the water, he smiled and nodded like a Maecenas. If he had ever swum himself, he might have seen the hardships of having twenty or thirty strangers and their dripping dogs crowd onto two hundred and fifty square feet of specially imported sand, but, like so many of the old-timers, Mr. Bascomb was wary of the water. It was in winter he used the pond; the fishing hut on the shore belonged to him, and every winter he pulled it out to the pond’s center, cut a hole through the ice, and, protected from the elements, fished through the hut’s open bottom. This was his asserted reason for refusing to sell, even though the would-be buyer, a Washington lawyer, had assured him that he could retain, in the deed, the right to fish from the shore lot and the right to keep the hut there. The real reason, observed the grandmothers, was that the old man was land-proud; he liked to know that the “old” summer people and the man with the trailer, who kept a grocery store across the mountains, were beholden to him every year for their swimming.

  “Money talks,” opined the local real-estate man, counselling a higher offer. But the young mothers firmly shook their heads; if old Mr. Bascomb was really disinclined to sell, it would not be fair to tempt him with an appeal to his baser nature. It would surely hurt the old man to come by on his Sunday drive and see a place barred that had always been open; even the grandmothers conceded this, when pressed by their daughters. There was a tacit covenant in the region governing change, property rights, and the relations between the summer people and the natives, though the old ladies, who were supposed to be its custodians, were growing more and more wayward and forgetful of their duties. “Quis custodiet ipsos custodies?” angrily cried a Swarthmore classics professor when his mother-in-law “surprised” her grandchildren by damming up her brook to make a swimming pool for them. You did not make swimming pools in Minster; the spirit of the place frowned on it. Here in this secluded corner of a northern state, with its spruce forests and mountain panoramas and round red cow barns and abandoned quarries and bears and wildcats and beavers, there was a tradition of pioneer simplicity and frugality of which the summer people were supposed to be proud. There were no estates or country clubs; there was not, as yet, even a cocktail set, properly speaking. The summer ladies baked and put up jellies and preserves, sharing their recipes with the farm women; the children went blueberrying and raspberrying, and sold Kool-Aid on Sundays and holidays at roadside stands under the maple shade. There was a dairy coöperative and an electrical coöperative and a coöperative store; the gaunt littl
e towns, with their cheese factories, had pallid fairs and barbecues and lawn fêtes and Fourth of July displays. The whole valley was different from the other side of the mountain range, where there were winter ski resorts and summer tourist hotels and gentlemen-farmers and Black Angus cattle. The summer people even dressed differently. The old ladies—widows of clergymen and college professors and lawyers—still wore white straw hats and printed lawn dresses; the husbands wore old clothes, and the young mothers, for the most part, blouses and skirts and moccasins. They came to the beach with liberal magazines and serious books borrowed from the library at the state capital and discussed world events and local oddities while keeping an eye on the children in the water. The “difference” of the place rested responsibly on their minds; they were anxious to preserve it, as an heirloom, for their children, like one of Grandma’s quilts. They had a cupboard language of place names, unknown to the mapmakers, for the ponds, brooks, and mountain peaks: harsh names that had been passed on to them by the old-timers, quaint names that had been coined by the children—Bloodsucker Pond, Quag Pond, Hunger Brook, Sodom Marsh, Niggerhead, Dogface, the Dark Tarn, Sliding Pools. They knew the wildflowers and the birds and the snakes. Some of them had taken a geology course at college, and, sitting to dry on slabs of limestone, they talked eagerly of regional formations—Ordovician, pre-Devonian, metamorphic rock, the mica schist in the gorges.

  And the place was beautiful—“beyoutifull,” as the two psychiatrists, alighting from their big black cars, now informed their womenfolk. The mop-haired psychiatrist took a stand on the narrow strip of sand, surveyed the birch-fringed lake, and addressed his colleague. “I like the background,” he stated, in an authoritative foreign voice, while the young mothers, a few feet away, but disregarded, as if by a stage convention, faintly grimaced at each other. “It’s like a picture.” Indeed it was. Like many northern lakes, with green waters reflecting the near birch and the long ridge of spruce trees rising sharply from the far shore, it resembled a picture on a calendar; one could imagine an Indian maiden and her lover in a birch canoe drifting across the canvas. But from the vantage point of the young mothers and their huddle of curious children, the psychiatrists themselves and their wives and female secretaries (“Right away, Doctor”) were now in the picture also.

  From their cars they brought out rainbow-striped beach towels and two large tan blankets, a portable radio, the New York Times, sun-tan oil, Noxzema, and two inner tubes. The two older women, disrobed, displayed mountains of white flesh and bulging veins spilling out of very tight new bathing suits, one lavender, one black; they wore white cut-out fancy sandals on short, fat white feet. While the two younger women oiled themselves and lay down, shoulder straps dropped, to sun themselves on towels, the rest of the party spread the blankets, turned on the radio, opened the newspaper. Twirling the dial, the reclining fat women sought a news program, found dance music, household hints, a French-language broadcast from Canada, a ball game; they propped their waved heads on their palms to appraise the frowning young mothers in their decorous bathing suits, who had reopened their books and magazines and were pointedly trying to read. The smaller psychiatrist, who had a bald head, thickly wrinkled brown skin, and bowed legs, impatiently switched off the radio (“Please! We are here to enjoy Nature”) and began to tell his colleague about a flattering letter he had once received from Stekel. His colleague answered with an anecdote about Ferenczi. The men’s voices were loud and heavily stressed; each repeated the other’s final line, choruslike, on a rising note: “I had a letter from Stekel.” “So? You had a letter from Stekel?” And then, to the lavender-suited woman, who wore a hearing aid: “Martha, he had a letter from Stekel.” The lake magnified this dialogue, as it did every sound; ordinarily, you could hear a fish jump half a mile away or an old Victrola playing in a house on the ridge.

  The young mothers rattled their magazines. In sheer self-defense, they declared afterward, they started a show conversation of their own, talking in high, strained voices of impersonal, mannerly things, till the children took it as a game and began to shout commonplaces at each other. “Nice day!” they bellowed. “Looks to me like rain!” “Sh-h-h!” duteously murmured the mothers, coloring. “These people will think you’re copying them.” “Mother, who are they?” whispered a pig-tailed girl, under cover of the radio, which had been turned on again. In this region, every stranger was supposed to be known, or at any rate identifiable. “They’re psychiatrists, I think, dear,” whispered back her mother, unplaiting the child’s wet braids. “That’s a sort of doctor that fixes your soul when it’s sick.” This explanation was uttered in a sweet, pensive, “understanding” tone that made the other mothers squirm. “How ridiculous,” said a boy, with a scornful glance at the soul doctors. “It’s not ridiculous; it’s a science,” reproved his mother. “It’s not a science, it’s a pseudo science—isn’t it, Mother? That’s what you and Daddy think,” said another boy, eagerly. “Hush,” said his mother, equably. “Manners! We will talk about it when we get home.” “But, Mother, where do they come from?” persisted the first child, irritably pulling her long hair away from her parent’s hands. “New York, silly—you can see it on their license plates,” said the second boy. “I can see that,” said the girl. “I mean up here, in Minster.” And the mothers’ widened eyes appealed to each other. “I know that, too,” said the same sturdy boy calmly as the mothers turned to stare at him. “They’re staying at Meade Farm.” “Ah-h-h,” cried the mothers softly. Meade Farm was a boarding farm fifteen miles away, in the next township, that advertised “Cultured Surroundings” in the Saturday Review. “Are you sure?” “How did you find out?” “I listened,” answered the boy simply. “You only have to listen to find out everything about them.” The mothers smiled fondly among themselves; this eight-year-old was the brightest of all their progeny, and every mother loved him as if he were a communal holding. “But why do they come here?” demanded a hoarse twelve-year-old. “Nobody from Meade Farm has ever come here before.” The mothers smiled wanly. “Somebody must have told them about it.”

  There it was: what could you do? It was foolish to imagine you could keep Poor Farm Pond and this special beach a community secret forever and yet, alackaday, these psychiatrists were the first rank outsiders to find their way along the dusty network of back roads and “discover” it, as they were now proclaiming to each other in blaring, self-commendatory tones. (“I am a water witch, eh, Doctor?” the mop-haired man chuckled.) Everybody else who had come here either was local, like the granite workers and the townspeople from the state capital, or had some thread of connection with one of the original summer families. If you did not know them, they knew a friend or a friend of a friend. The young mothers could not but feel, forlornly, that they were witnessing the end of an epoch as they watched the frizzle-headed psychiatrist, who had sloping shoulders and breasts like a woman, don a black bathing cap and stride into the water with one of the inner tubes. Soon he was shouting, through the megaphone of his hands, that the water was wonderful and splashing himself to demonstrate it, like a man in a shower. The small brown psychiatrist fitted on a nose clip and followed him, and finally the whole party was in the water, with the inner tubes and a ball; the two immense older women floated in the inner tubes; the men tossed the ball back and forth to each other; the secretaries lay sunning on the raft.

  It did not occur to them, probably, that they were monopolizing the water—this was the kindest explanation and the one that had to be given the children, who were looking on with poison-steeped eyes, like little savages seeing the white man preëmpt the happy hunting ground. One atavistic little girl, in fact, picked up her homemade bow and arrow and, pointing it at the bathing party, glanced around, grinning boldly, for approval; her mother seized her wrist, slapped it, and confiscated the toy. But the children could not be quelled. One and all, they were refusing to swim while these awful people were in the water. They were unmoved by the force of example—“Come, Mummy will sw
im with you,” announced one resolute matron—and coldly indifferent to the argument, usually decisive for them, that they would hurt the people’s feelings. On the other hand, despite whispered cajolery, they declined to leave and go and take a dip in Granny’s pool or be driven to a pothole, ten miles off, made by a waterfall on Dogface—a mossy, cold, green, balsamy, hidden spot that was saved for special treats. The older children simply sat, wrapped in dirty towels, and stared adamantly at the strangers, while the younger ones, not comprehending, began to whimper. The mothers gazed at each other pregnantly. The children’s attitude seemed a judgment handed down from on high; it absolved them of responsibility. They did not wish to be snobbish or over-fastidious, God knew, but there was a limit. They consulted their wristwatches; they shrugged. Grasping towels, children, sneakers, reading matter, they rose in panoplied purpose and picked their way to their cars, past the psychiatrists’ outspread gear. It was only three-thirty, and the sun still lay warm on the violated pond.

  “There is a limit, Pick,” said Margaret Callaway to her husband, striding into her house with a retinue of weeping children behind her. Tall and olive-skinned, with a long, aristocratic nose and a shock of black short hair, she confronted her husband with the air of an avenging queen. “The children mutinied,” she announced. “All of them. Ours and everybody else’s.” And she recited what had happened, crisply, while the children bated their sobs to listen to the account of their grievance.

  “The children simply copied your attitude,” said Pickman (“Pickles”) Callaway, an industrial consultant, when he had heard. “I knew you would say that,” answered his wife, between her teeth. “I knew it, I knew it. But, Pick, I promise you I didn’t say a word—not a word.” Her manner had become hysterical; the children looked up at her curiously. “You didn’t have to say a word,” said Pickles, in a more sympathetic tone. “You obviously looked volumes. Kids are animals,” he added, stroking a small, crew-cut head. “They felt you stiffen up the way a dog feels it when a human being is afraid.”