Cast a Cold Eye

by Mary McCarthy

  His social mobility derived from the fact that he was capable of being used by other people as a symbol, and a symbol not only of an idea (e.g., tolerance) but of an actual person or persons. Thus a husband, drawing up a guest list for an evening party, might remark to his wife, “How about having the Caldwells?” (or the Muellers or the Kaplans). “Oh my God,” his wife would shriek, “do we have to have them?” “I like them.” “They’re awful, and besides they won’t know anybody.” “They’re old friends of mine. I owe them something.” “Have them when I’m away then—you know they can’t stand me.” “Don’t be silly. They’d be crazy about you if you’d give them half a chance.” In desperation, the wife would cast about her. She saw her party, her charming, harmonious, mildly diversified party, heading straight for shipwreck on the rock of her husband’s stubbornness. Then all at once an inspiration would seize her. “Look,” she would say, in a more reasonable tone, “why don’t you ask Francis Cleary instead? He’d get along very well with these other people. And he’s your friend, just as much as Hugh Caldwell is. You’re wrong if you think it’s a matter of the Caldwells’ being your friends. It’s just that they wouldn’t fit in.” And the husband, reading the storm warnings as clearly as she, telling himself that if he insisted on the Caldwells his wife might treat them with impossible rudeness, and that even if she did not, she would make her concession an excuse for filling the house for months to come with her intolerable friends, that he might win the battle but lose the war, would reluctantly, grudgingly, consent. After all, Francis Cleary belonged to the circle of the detested Caldwells. To have him would be to have their spirit if not their substance, and, to be perfectly honest—he would say to himself—wasn’t it the principle of the Caldwells rather than their persons that was the issue at stake?

  Another hostess, on slightly better terms with the prospective host, or perhaps merely a better tactician, would begin differently. “Darling,” she would say, looking up from the memorandum pad on which already a few names had been neatly aligned. “I have an idea. Why don’t we ask Francis Cleary?” The air of discovery with which she brought forth this proposal would accord oddly with the fact that they always did have Francis Cleary at their parties, but the husband, who had been fearing something much worse (some old school friend or a marvelous singer she had met at a benefit), would in his relief not notice the anomaly. “All right,” he would say, grateful to her for her interest in this rather dull old business associate, and before he had time to change his mind, she would have telephoned Francis Cleary and secured his acceptance. Then, when the question of the Caldwells was raised, she would pout slightly. “Oh,” she would say, “don’t you think that makes too much of the same thing? After all, we’re having Francis Cleary, and I do think it’s a mistake to have a bloc at a party.” “I don’t know.” “Oh, darling, you remember the time we had all those Italians and they sat in the corner and talked to each other…”

  In either case, the outcome was the same. Francis Cleary would appear at the party, representing the absent, unassimilable Caldwells. He was their abstraction, their ghost. Unobtrusive, moderately well bred, he would come early and stay late. He made no particular social contribution, but the host, whenever he glanced in his direction, would feel a throb of solidarity with his own past, and at some point in the evening he and Francis Cleary would have a talk about the Caldwells and Francis would tell him all about Hugh Caldwell’s latest adventure. Not ordinarily a brilliant talker, in this particular field Francis Cleary was unsurpassed. He was a master of the second-hand anecdote, the vicarious exploit. Hugh Caldwell, who suffered dreadfully from asthma and had a distressing habit of choking and gasping in the middle of his sentences, never could have done himself the justice Francis did. In fact, Hugh Caldwell, telling his own stories, interposed an obstacle, a distraction—himself, the living, asthmatic flesh—between the story and the audience. As the movies have supplanted the stage, and the radio the concert hall, so Francis Cleary in modern life tended to supplant his friend, Hugh Caldwell, and in supplanting him, he glorified him. He was the movie screen on which the aging actress, thanks to the magic of the camera and make-up man, appears young and radiant, purged of her wrinkles; he was the radio over which one hears a symphony without seeing the sweat of the first violinist.

  And yet, like all canned entertainment, Francis Cleary produced, in the end, a melancholy effect. To listen to him too long was like going to the movies in the morning; it engendered a sense of alienation and distance. Eventually, the host would move away, his desire to see Caldwell killed, not quickened, by this ghostly reunion, as the appetite is killed by a snack before dinner, as the taste for van Gogh’s paintings was killed by the reproductions of the “Sunflowers” and “L’Arlesienne” that used to symbolize cultural sympathies in the living rooms of Francis Cleary’s friends. But as the lesson of “L’Arlesienne” prevented hardly anyone from making the same mistake with Picasso’s “Lady in White,” so the lesson of Hugh Caldwell never prevented the host from allowing Francis Cleary to substitute on some other occasion for another old friend who was distasteful to the hostess, and many parties would be composed exclusively of Francis Clearys, male and female, stand-ins, reasonable facsimiles, who could fraternize with each other under the Redon or the Rouault or the Renoir reproductions—ready with anecdote, quotation, and paraphrase, amiable and immune as seconds at a duel. Afterwards, the host and hostess, reviewing the situation, would be unable to decide why it was that though everybody stayed late, got drunk, and ate all the sandwiches, nobody had had a particularly good time. And the failure of the party, far from causing bitterness or recrimination, would actually draw them together. Murmuring criticisms of their guests, they would pull up the blankets and embrace, convinced that they preferred each other, or rather that they preferred themselves as a couple to anybody else they knew.

  But what about Francis Cleary riding home in a taxi with his female equivalent? Sex was not for him; his given name disclosed this—it could be either masculine or feminine; nobody ever called him Frank. He might be a bachelor or a spinster; quite often, he was a couple, but a couple which functioned as an integer. If he had begun his Francis Cleary existence as a single man, it was unwise for him to marry, for a wife might define him too sharply, people might like her and then other people would dislike her; before he knew it, through her, he might become the issue rather than the solution of a dispute. To say that sex was not for him does not mean that he did not sometimes have girls, or, in his female aspect, men; he might even have been in love, but since nearly the whole area of his life was public and social, this one small reserved section which he kept for himself was private, intensely so. His romantic activities, if he had any, were extracurricular. They did not interfere with his social function, and it is impossible to tell which was cause and which effect: was it the fact that he had very early in life fallen in love with the married lady that placed his weekends and his evenings and his vacations at the disposal of his friends, or had he recognized from the very beginning that he was cast for the part of the professional friend and arranged his affairs accordingly, cultivating without real predilection sexual tastes so impossible that they must be forever gratified sub rosa, under assumed names, in Pullman cars, alleys, cheap hotel rooms, public parks? How was anybody to know? In some of his manifestations, it seemed quite plain that design was at the bottom of it, that love had been gladly foregone for the sound of the telephone bell. He would hint at a disastrous passion or a vice to each of his married friends when the intimacy reached a certain stage, like a stranger on a train who after a given amount of conversation produces a calling card, but these confessions had a faint air of fraudulence or at least of frivolity: how could anyone take very seriously a passion or a morbid inclination which left its victim free every day from five until midnight and all day Sundays and holidays? Nevertheless, his confessions were accepted often with a kind of gratitude. They served to “explain” him to new acquaintances, who
might have thought him peculiar if they had not been assured that he kept a truly horrible vice in his closet.

  In other cases, there appeared to have been no calculation. He thought sporadically of marriage but kept looking for “the right person,” who was assumed to exist somewhere just beyond the social horizon, like a soul waiting to be born. Yet whenever a living being materialized who wore the features of the right person, she was found to be already married or indifferent or tied to an aged mother or in some other way impossible. So the vigil continued, until time made it an absurdity, and at fifty Francis Cleary ceased to yearn, ascribed his fate to a geographical accident (everybody has his double and everybody has his complement, but not necessarily in New York or even in America), to an over-romantic temperament, or simply to the bad habit, contracted in adolescence and never overcome, of falling in love with married women, which made him regard every woman who lacked a husband as essentially incomplete. Putting love behind him, Francis Cleary would throw himself more actively than ever into the occupation of friendship, the life of visits, small gifts and favors exchanged, mild gossip, concern over illnesses, outings for the children, and would, quite often, experience a kind of late blooming which would inspire all his friends to hope that he was at last on the verge of marriage, while in reality it was the abandonment of the idea of marriage that had permitted his nature, finally, to express itself. In this aspect—the aspect of innocence—Francis Cleary was almost lovable. Certainly he commanded the affection if not the active preference of his friends, and those husbands and wives who had accepted him as the lesser evil grew to like him for himself. It is significant, nevertheless, that he was liked for goodness of heart, which does not provoke envy, rather than for talent, charm, or beauty, which do. And goodness of heart notwithstanding, it was still a chore to dine or take a walk with him alone, and if by chance in these tête-à-têtes a muted happiness was achieved, his companion could never quite get over it, referred to the occasion repeatedly in conversation (“You know, I had quite a good time with Francis Cleary the other day”), as though a miracle had been witnessed and virtue been its own reward.

  Yet here perhaps there has been a confusion of identity. It is likely that the Francis Cleary we have just been speaking of, the good, bewildered, yearning Francis Cleary, was never the true Francis Cleary at all, but an uncle for whom the real one, the modern one, was named. Whenever they met the good Francis Cleary, his friends were struck by a certain anachronism in his character; they would say that he reminded them of their childhood, of a maiden aunt who did the mending, or a bachelor great-uncle who gave them a gold piece every Christmas morning and left his watch to them in his will when he died. The true Francis Cleary had no such overtones. He was as much a product of the age as nylon or plywood, and he could be distinguished from the others, those uncles and aunts of his who lingered on in a later period, by the fact that one did not pity him. One could not mourn for Francis, because he did not mourn for himself. He cast no shadow behind him of thwarted ambition, un-consummated desire, lost ideals. Indeed, one had only to set the word frustration beside him to see that the very conception of frustration was outmoded, hopelessly provincial—perhaps in the Middle West, in small towns, men still walked the streets restlessly at night, questioning their fate, wondering how it might have been otherwise, but in any advanced center of civilization, people, like sheets, came pre-shrunk; life held neither surprises nor disappointments for them.

  And your true Francis Cleary was the perfect sanforized man, the ideal which others only approximated. He appeared to have no demands whatsoever—that was the beauty of him. Or rather, as in a correctly balanced equation, demands and possible satisfactions canceled out, so that the man himself, i.e., the problem, vanished. When an apartment door shut behind him, it was as if he had never been. Nobody discussed him in his absence, or if they did, it was only as a concession to convention. Once or twice a year, he had a small, official illness, and in his comfortable hotel apartment received flowers, books, and wine-flavored calf s-foot jelly from his friends. Like everything else about him, these illnesses had a symbolic character: they permitted his friends to bestow on him tokens of a concern they did not feel. Without these illnesses, his friends might have grown to think themselves monsters of insensibility—was it, after all, natural to have a close friend whom you never gave a thought to? Francis, farseeing, provident, took care that such questions should not arise. He could no more afford to be a thorn in the conscience, the subject of an inward argument, than to be the occasion of verbal debate. The true friend might languish in furnished rooms with pneumonia and only the girl across the hall to help, or fight delirium tremens in Bellevue, but Francis’ sore throats were always well attended. In the same way, he would from time to time present his friends with some innocuous little problem (should he go to Maine or New Hampshire during his vacation?) with the air of a man who asks for help in the most serious crisis of his life. His friends would loyally come through with advice and travel booklets, reminiscences of childhood summers, letters of introduction, and feel, when Francis set off at last to the place where he had intended to go originally, that they had stood by him through thick and thin, that the demands of friendship had been handsomely satisfied.

  Once in a great while, when a friendship showed unmistakable signs of limpness (when a husband and wife seemed to be falling in love with each other again, or had reached the point of estrangement where each saw his own friends, or began to cultivate the acquaintance of another Francis Cleary, a competitor), Francis would go so far as to borrow money from the husband. These loans were of course mere temporary accommodations, and the warm glow of generosity felt by the husband almost always served to restore the circulation of the friendship. Still, during the short time he had the money (he usually waited until the twenty-seventh to borrow and then paid it back promptly the first of the next month), Francis was always very nervous. Once or twice he thought he had seen fear in the husband’s eyes, fear that financial need would turn “that nice Francis Cleary,” as the wives often called him, into another “poor old Frank.” Was it possible, he believed the husband was asking himself, that he could have been deceived? Had importunity, cleverly disguised, always lurked in this old, old acquaintance, and had it waited this long to strike? The classic phrase of male disillusionment, “I thought you were different,” trembled visibly on his lips, and Francis saw himself slipping. The moment, of course, passed. Francis repaid the money, and the husband, metaphorically wiping the sweat from his brow, wondered how he could have doubted him. Certainly Francis was different, had always been so. The friends who had been with him at school or at college, and who could remember him at all, were absolutely at one on this point.

  Even there, at the very beginning, importunity had been excluded from his nature. The desire to excel, to shine, to be closest, best friend, most liked, best dressed, funniest, had played no part with him. He had been content simply to be there, to be along, the unnoticed eye-witness. Wherever he had gone to school, whether it was Exeter or P. S. 12, whether Yale or Iowa or Carnegie Tech, the Chicago Art Institute or Harvard Business, he was the man that nobody could think of a quotation for when the yearbook was being compiled; and if you opened the yearbook today you would find the editors’ defeat commemorated by a blank below his photograph. Yet he had not been disliked, for there had been in him none of the burning hunger, the watchfulness, the covert shame (however carefully masked by studiousness, indifference to society, eccentricity, geological field trips, bird walks) that brand the true outsider for the vengeance of those inside. During the rushing period he had been neither too anxious nor too self-assured nor too indifferent, with the result that, in many cases, he was pledged to a slightly better fraternity than he might have expected to make; and in the cases where he was overlooked in the general excitement, the omission was always remedied—he was quietly taken in later on, in the junior year instead of the sophomore. And the welcome given him, whether tardy or pro
mpt, never failed to create a small commotion among the outsiders, who knew themselves, correctly, to be more brilliant, better looking, richer, better scholars, better athletes, better drinkers, or whatever was considered valuable, than he. Inevitably, they construed the pledging of Francis Cleary as a calculated affront to themselves. Then and thereafter, forever and ever, the choice of Francis Cleary was not an affirmation of something, but a negation of something else.