Cast a Cold Eye

by Mary McCarthy

  Yet the fact that he knew himself to be, on the contrary, rosy-cheeked, gold-haired, well-favored, a graduate student of history at Harvard University, the indulged son of his parents, did not dispose of his irritation. In fact, it only quickened it by making it appear unreasonable. To grit his teeth and endeavor not to hear would have been the conventional recourse, but his native hospitality and politeness now suddenly forbade him to eliminate the suffering old man from his consciousness, even if this had been physically possible. He felt a social obligation to listen. Yet the faculty of sympathetic attention, the young man rapidly discovered, as he tried remorsefully to exercise it, is like the faculty of hearing: it ceases to reply to a regularly offered stimulus, just as one ceases to be able to hear a clock ticking in a room. He found, upon experiment, that it was possible to replenish his compassion by picturing the old man as dying (in the manner of a jaded libertine who resorts to a mental image to resuscitate the inert fact of love), but even this spur to fellow-feeling soon failed to prick his imagination. In a very short time, he resigned himself to the truth that he could feel sad about the old man but not really sorry, and that for every squeeze of generalized pity, there was a spurt of concrete hatred and repugnance.

  “Am I a monster?” he asked himself curiously. “Or is this what everyone secretly feels toward another’s ills, toward the intrusion of a foreign body into the consciousness—a reflex of distaste and censure?” In common with many of his generation who had missed the overseas war, he had kept, up to this moment, a boy’s methodical piety toward the paraplegic, the refugee, the concentration-camp inmate, and even, in a peculiar way (typical also of his age and class), toward the torturer, who seemed to share somehow with the victim the distinction of participating in the actual. Now with the actual close at hand, in the form of a living sufferer, he was astonished to find it more remote from his own center of being, more irrelevant to his purposes and interests, than the sight of a plane crashing he had recently watched in a newsreel. A slight tremor of anxiety went through him: would others extrude him from their midst so casually when his time came, or was he himself deficient in the ordinary corpuscles of humanity?

  A screen had been cutting off his view of the invalid across the hall, but at mealtime he gradually became aware of a process of ingestion that was going on in that room, a steady munching and salivating, which he felt rather than heard. This surprised him very much, and once, when the screen was moved, he caught a glimpse of a lump of bedclothes in the middle of the iron bedstead, which surprised him also, in the same way. There was something very active in that lump, very much alive, though how a mere convexity of bedclothes could communicate that impression, the young man could not tell.

  All along, some reasoner in himself had been urging on him the idea that the old fellow was not really very sick, but the fact that such a suggestion could even occur to him was so shocking to his conscience that he had not stopped to consider it on its merits. Now, however, he sat up in bed and began to attend more objectively to his neighbor, who at present was banging feebly with what sounded like a spoon on a glass. A nurse grumbled next door in the diet kitchen; there was a rustle of starched skirts. “Use your bell, Mr. Ciccone,” she commanded. A faint moan answered her; a creak of arch-preservers followed, as the nurse moved swiftly toward the bed. “Mr. Ciccone!” she cried sharply. The young man’s heart gave a lurch (“Forgive me,” he dumbly articulated, winging the thought after the old man, to catch him there, on the brink), but then from behind the screen came a grunt and a gurgling tobaccoey noise, like the mirth of a subterranean river-god. The old man was laughing.

  The young man uttered a limp cry. Everything had abruptly coalesced: the name Mr. Ciccone, the pictorial bass with a crack in it, the tremolo and the quaver. Mr. Ciccone was acting. And instantly that collection of noises, to which the young man had been vainly striving to assign a poignant universal reality, acquired life and character. The unseen Mr. Ciccone presented himself: yellow skin, rheumy yet brilliant black eyes, white mustachios, thin liver-spotted hands, long white nightshirt. An Italian grocer, the young man conjectured, with a son in dentistry or the automobile business; a natural obstructionist and fraud, posed, in a white apron, with a mime’s sense of the picturesque, against the escarole and the pomegranates, the barrels of imported almonds and walnuts, weighing out the parmigiano on the non-Detecto scales. The young man laughed joyously aloud. Mr. Ciccone was off his conscience and lodged preferentially in his heart.

  From this moment, he came to wait for the groans and laments, for the plaintive tinkle of the spoon on the glass, the short puffs of indignation, the struggle against the bedpan and the hypodermic syringe. Mr. Ciccone, as he soon learned from one of the internes, was not in fact very sick; a leg injury and a mild diabetic condition had combined to put him in the hospital, where he was regarded as a “character” by the nurses on the floor. All day long, they scolded the disobedient old party, who was continually bored and mischievous but never would trust his bell to summon attention. He felt cozened by this “bell” or light, not being able to hear it ring, and preferred to rely, in any personal emergency, on his own histrionic powers, weakly crying, “Nurse, nurse!”, tapping with the spoon on the glass, gasping, choking, playing dead. He was able to counterfeit extremity with such various and graphic realism that, though he had been some time in the hospital, the nurses would still rustle in alarm down the corridor (“Coming, Mr. Ciccone!”), only to find the old man, with the covers drawn up to his chin, chuckling at them and demanding a game of casino or a glass of Coca-Cola. Sometimes, when a new student relief nurse was on the corridor, Mr. Ciccone would actually get his way and would be sitting up in bed, finishing the forbidden beverage, when the head floor-nurse would fly in, all indignant cap and rattling keys—“Why, Mr. Ciccone, you know that Coca-Cola is bad for you”—and whisk the glass out of the room.

  Mr. Ciccone, naturally, took medicine only under protest. He would bargain for a game of cards in exchange for good behavior, and, failing this, two or three times a day he would put up a convincing resistance to the sedatives, enemas, milk of magnesia, penicillin or insulin injections called for by his chart, only stopping short of direct physical combat, and, having concentrated a whole battery of nurses in his room, submitting all of a sudden with an exaggerated show of weakness as though to twit them for their display of force. After each of these submissions, he would moan for a long time, harrowingly, so that the delighted young man across the way could trace (as he knew someone was meant to) the whole nefarious course of the medicine down Mr. Ciccone’s injured gullet into his protesting stomach or through the tissues of his aged buttocks up to his shuddering heart.

  The young man, too, execrated the routines of the hospital. The dreary food, dirty rooms, noise, lack of conveniences, the understaffed and officious personnel with its eternal “Doctor’s orders” vexed his intellect far more than his comfort, yet, on his own behalf, as a private patient, he could not nerve himself to complain. Conditions in hospitals all over the country, so he had heard, or read in an article, were nearly as absurd as this; someone ought to speak out against being waked up, as he was, two and a quarter hours before breakfast, at six every morning, on the pretext of having his temperature taken or his bandage examined, and waked up again (assuming he had been allowed to fall asleep) at three in the afternoon with a basin of lukewarm water, a toothbrush, and an order to “wash up” for the night. The idea of paying twelve dollars a day for this nonchalant and peremptory “care” was a constant insult to his acumen, but to protest on this basis was to imply that, had he been paying less, he would have had fewer grounds for objections. This, to a young man of liberal views, was not a tenable position. For purposes of social criticism, he could have wished himself a patient in the wards, where the very generalized injustice of the situation would have given him a right to speak. Shyness, the wish to appear a “good” patient, chivalry toward the nurses, all contributed to silence his criticism, but in his
own eyes he was restrained, above all, by the sense that a demonstration against bureaucratic routine and authoritarian slovenliness on the part of a single private patient would so plainly lack a “popular” character.

  What he had seen, however, of conditions in the private wing did not inspire him to transfer to the men’s ward for the mere privilege of playing the rebel there. He was determined simply to get well and be shut of this place as quickly as possible. He had been put in the hospital by his friend, and by his friend’s wife, whom, as a matter of fact, he had been leaning forward to kiss when he fell off the ladder in the studio. They had sent him a bunch of bronze chrysanthemums and left him more or less to himself; he could imagine that Mrs. X regarded the fall as some sort of “judgment” for their series of desultory indiscretions; she had not, in any case, during their single stiff visit to his bedside, directed her eyes fully into his.

  For this, the young man was thankful. For his own part, he had no wish to see either of the Xes again and had only feared that the accident, and the whole atmosphere of crisis surrounding it, would enclose him in a triangle by a sheer convention of the prevailing social geometry. Whatever had happened to prevent this—whether Mrs. X had “told” her husband, whether he had “guessed,” or whether the accident had brought home to them what a nuisance, after all, other people (guests, in particular) really were, a common discovery of couples—the young man did not care. Throughout their visit, he himself had chattered incessantly about the hospital, Mr. Ciccone, the personal traits of the different nurses, never stopping to inquire about the farm, the pig, the projected dinner party, Mr. X’s painting, while husband and wife exchanged glances, like promissory notes on a future conversation, indicating that they would never have believed, if illness and isolation had not shown them, how intensely trivial and self-centered this friend in the nightshirt was.

  The solitude in which they left him, and the repudiation of their transient intimacy, gave the young man occasion to assess in his own terms the twenty-four-year-old person who, shorn of all identifying marks and validating references, was lying cranked up in the scarred hospital bed. His preoccupation with the gossip of the corridor was, he quite readily conceded, a confession of envy and inferiority. He felt a sort of jealousy of this whole affairé world of illness and medication from which he was excluded. He wished to know its language and be accepted by it, yet the consciousness that his injury was a minor one made him hesitate to trench upon it. He believed that the nurses looked askance at him and treated him with subtle discrimination, as though questioning the professional wisdom of the doctor in detaining him here so long. He would have liked to say that he agreed with them, that he, too, could not understand why a mere fractured elbow should require so protracted a stay in bed, to assure them that it was not of his own desire but by the arbitrary will of another that he was there presuming on their patience.

  This sense of his own nothingness in contradistinction to some darker reality had been threatening him, he now perceived, from childhood. The tone of his mother’s voice, sad, velvety, genuflectory, pronouncing the words “They’re poor” came back to him now with horror. “And are we rich?” he heard himself pipe. “No, dear, just comfortable”—the tone was of modest complacency, tinted with social awareness. In Cambridge, among his fellows, with the Xes, even, on their farm, he had achieved a minor entrée—he could be found, like a point on a social graph. But here, where no attachments secured him, where no one knew his history or his friends, he felt himself suddenly floating, uncircumstantiated, a mere transparency, and this sense of himself as an absence was so compelling that he was startled by the sight of his face, which looked at him through its eyeholes like a Christmas mask when they brought him in a mirror to shave by. The mortification of being alone, unvisited, unjustified, of having his name spelled wrong every day on the menu he was given to check for his choice of dishes, of having no bedroom slippers or pajamas (à la mode enough in Cambridge but a source of daily wonder here) had so wrought upon him that he had anticipated, without realizing it, an actual pauperization of his features. The sight of the familiar gold forelock, full lips, and snub nose was terribly disconcerting, as though he looked upon himself in effigy.

  To exist, he suddenly became convinced, was an act of deliberate impersonation. Mr. Ciccone, across the hall, being shaved with an electric razor by a party of laughing student nurses, was a living warrant of this; Mr. Ciccone, imitating old age in a high infirm quaver, was both actor and régisseur—he had seized his part from the director and was executing it con amore. The young man listened with envy; the juvenile bit assigned him and, with him, his whole class and generation of soft-voiced, accommodating extras was too shadowy; he had no cue to rise to in the play. What was it, he asked himself, that sustained Mr. Ciccone and, for that matter, all the lively old mountebanks of the era—Yeats, Augustus John, Freud, Einstein, Churchill? Surely not belief in the self, since the self, as these old men knew, was a joke, a nothing, a point du départ. Mere virtuosity perhaps, and a growing closetful of stage effects—the paunch, the wrinkle, the limp; the jowl, the shank, the bald pate. In the Santa Claus suit of old age, beneath the padding and the pillow, some spry punchinello had hold of the vital principle of artifice.

  The young man had been in the hospital two or three days and was sitting up, with bathroom privileges, before a certain suspicion that had been attaching itself to Mr. Ciccone became a verified fact. Mr. Ciccone, like Homer, was not a single individual but a collaboration. There were, astonishingly, four old men on the corridor, of whom the one called Mr. Ciccone was only the ringleader—four old men, bedded in private or semi-private rooms, two of them incontinent, all insubordinate, unsubdued, sworn enemies, every one, of the bedpan, the catheter, and the needle. Antiphonally or singly, they kept up a sort of plain chant, a thin, wheezy dirge that went on, all day long in its eerie unaccentual modality:

  At certain times of the day, this cry became more vociferous, when the student nurse, for example, passed through the wing with the penicillin injections. Her entry to the semi-private rooms, at the far end of the corridor, was announced by a violent hubbub: imprecations, sobbing, pleading, the occasional crash of falling furniture. The young man would lay aside his book and wait for the authoritative creak of the head floor nurse proceeding to the scene, the sound of feminine chiding (“Mr. Wright, you’re not being thoughtful, you’re not being thoughtful at all”), the shriek, and then the after-cry, piercing, long-drawn-out, that vibrated through the corridor as the young nurse went on to the next room, to the women, who made no sound, and finally to Mr. Ciccone and himself.

  In the case of two feeblest old men down the hall, sincerity and trumpery, so far as the young man could determine, were blended in the act of resistance. The needle, of course, did not hurt much, but in the lumbar regions of their spirit, something, plainly, was being violated. They were childish, in the nurses’ phrase; there was a blur in their minds between actual pain and the imagined representation of it; they did not trouble to distinguish and acted out every fancy with a pure, innocent sort of expressiveness. Mr. Ciccone, by contrast, was a conscious artist and a borrower. Sometimes, in the afternoon, the young man would overhear him softly rehearsing a sound effect that he had picked up from one of his coevals, essaying it again and again, tentatively, like someone practicing on a flute.

  Later, in the after-supper lull, the mournful phrase, fully developed, would suddenly issue from Mr. Ciccone’s room, to be taken up again by one of the other Methuselahs, reminded by it of his own aches and miseries, so that the whole corridor would echo with the plaint of the old men, and the single, stolid night nurse would clump, scolding, into the diet kitchen, shut the door, and heat herself a cup of coffee.

  This troupe of ancients, as if to confirm the young man’s theories, was handled by the hospital staff, at any critical juncture, with precisely that mixture of indulgence and asperity that characterizes the plain man in his relations with the artist. On the ni
ght that the two incontinent old fellows broke a draining-tube and drank a bottle of gentian violet between them, climbed out of bed and shouted in the corridor, an orderly, like a stagehand, came whistling down the hall to subdue them. “What will they think of next?” a white-haired nurse demanded, poking her head gratuitously into the young man’s room; doors slammed, lights went on, the elevator gates clashed. Only Mr. Ciccone’s room remained dark and almost ostentatiously peaceful, though the young man’s ear caught the sound of a dry chuckle, repeated at intervals. Yet the fact was, as the cleaning woman, shaking her head and her mop, confided to the young man in voluptuous brogue the next morning, one of those old rapscallions had just missed a date with Saint Peter.