Cast a Cold Eye

by Mary McCarthy

  All the while, the women patients were silent.

  He had learned from one of the nurses that a woman was dying of cancer somewhere in the private wing, but only once, during his first days in the hospital, did he hear a woman’s voice that was not that of a nurse or a visitor—a young woman’s laugh and the sound of a door closing on it. This feminine silence began to disturb him very much; the idea that sick women of various ages and complaints were lying, blanketed, all around him, behind half-closed doors, each sheltering her unknown portion of suffering with a kind of uterine possessiveness, had the effect on him of a tactile sensation—as though he were encased in felt. He found himself with a strange, pressing desire to uncover that female suffering, to make it reveal itself to him by a sob, a gasp, a murmur, to have his ear know its contours, like a pleasure. On the fourth night of his stay, he was awakened suddenly, out of a deep sleep, by prolonged shrieks coming from the darkness, a woman’s voice raised again and again in screams of such appalling vibrancy that his hair stood up on his head. “The cancer patient, at last!”—the jubilant exclamation sprang out of him, quite unintentionally. He sat straight up in bed to listen, trembling with cold and excitement. Here there was no question of hearing or not hearing; these cries transfixed him with horror and yet he listened to them, fascinated, in the tingling stealth of discovery. He knew immediately that he was not meant to hear; these shrieks were being wrung from a being that yielded them against its will; yet in this fact, precisely, lay their power to electrify the attention. “A dying woman screaming in the night,” the young man repeated musingly, as the cries stopped, at their very summit, as abruptly as they had started, leaving a pounding stillness, “this is the actual; the actual, in fact, is that which should not be witnessed. The actual,” he defined, pronouncing the syllables slowly and distinctly in a pedagogical style, “under which may be subsumed the street accident, the plane crash, the atrocity, is pornography.” Closing his eyes, he sank back on a long breath of relief.

  He awakened the next morning with a vivid feeling of joy and liberation, as if during the night a responsibility had been sloughed off. He felt blithe and ready to live, selfishly and inconsiderately, like the expressive old men; the actual no longer drew him with its womanish terrors and mysteries, its sphinx-rebuff and invidia. “Cast a cold eye on life, on death,” he sang out, borrowing from old Yeats’s tombstone. “Horseman, pass by.” He was positively elated, in fact, to be young, healthy, and hungry, and, as he meant to tell Dr. Z as soon as he appeared on his rounds, determined to go home to Cambridge on the one-o’clock train. This elation induced in him an unusual talkativeness; to the fat grumpy old nurse who came in with the thermometer, he could not resist an allusion to what he had heard during the night. The old nurse surveyed him tersely, shook down the thermometer without comment, unpinned her watch from her uniform, and, snapping her fingers impatiently, extended her veined hand for his pulse. “Maternity case,” she finally surmised, handing him his toothbrush and the tin basin. “You won’t hear a sound out of Mrs. Miller [mentioning the name of the cancer patient]. She’s quiet as a lamb next door.” The young man turned white at the thought of that deathly stillness so near him; he had imagined the next room to be empty, for not a sound had issued from it, and passing it on his trips down the hall to the bathroom, he had observed that the door was always shut. The next question was drawn from him by a compulsion; he did not wish to ask it and threw it out with diffidence: “She is under opiates, I suppose?”

  The nurse surveyed him again with a short, measuring movement of the eye. “Brush your teeth, now,” she commanded curtly. “You know we are not permitted to give out information about the other patients.” She withdrew the bedpan from the commode, jerked off the towel that shrouded it, and slid it under the covers. “Put your light on when you’re through,” she directed. The young man sat up. “But I am allowed to go to the bathroom!” he exclaimed. “Not this morning,” she said firmly. “Doctor says we are to stay in bed this morning.” “But why?” demanded the young man, now thoroughly alarmed and suspicious. The nurse’s creased face snapped shut. “Curiosity killed the cat,” she retorted. “Doctor will be in early to see you.” “I demand—” cried the young man after her, as she bustled out, leaving the door open, but he broke off, conscious of absurdity, for what he had been about to say was “I demand to see a lawyer,” which was ridiculous, for he was certainly free to get up and dress and leave the hospital. The idea of flight suddenly offered itself to him as the only feasible solution. He pictured, with a return of his early-morning gaiety, the rubber-soled chase down the corridor, the escape down the fire-stairs. His imagination, however, faltered at the thought of the office: to leave without paying was unthinkable, yet would they be likely to take a check from him under such unusual conditions? He feared, all at once, to put this question to the test. He felt unequal to the imagined commotion—the painstaking verification of identity, the call to his bank in Boston—and for what purpose, he asked himself, would I do all that, for the mere assertion of my individuality? For the sake of another, he reasoned, I could conceivably do it, if it were a question of rescue or sacrifice; but for myself? He lay back dutifully on the bedpan and in a moment put on his light.

  The nurse came in and he said coldly, “In the future, would you take the trouble to close the door when you leave the room, particularly during these intimate moments?” Yet even as he began to speak, he felt himself blushing and the final phrase, to which he had meant to impart a sarcastic intonation, were mumbled out thickly, in a tone, almost, of apology. The nurse threw the cover over the bedpan and went out, closing the door behind her with a decisive click.

  An hour later, young Dr. Z appeared, all gold fillings, hair era brosse, smile, and rimless spectacles. “We are going to reset that elbow for you,” he announced. “Anyone you want to get in touch with?” The young man opened his mouth to argue. He was free (was he not?), he reminded himself, to get up and dress and leave the hospital. He had only to refuse. The Xes, if it came down to it, could be summoned to bail him out of here. Dr. Z, after all, had no title or charter to his patronage. He had only to tell him that he preferred to have the arm reset, if necessary, in Cambridge, where he had friends and a regular physician; there was nothing in this preference that was derogatory to Dr. Z. The doctor, in his white gown, stood looking down at him, smiling rather inscrutably, as though he were very much aware of what was going on in the young man’s mind. “Those friends of yours,” he suggested, with a flick of the sterile glance in the direction of the dying chrysanthemums, “do you want us to give them a call?” A student nurse knocked and came in with a tray and a hypodermic needle. The young man’s jaws worked and he shook his head wordlessly in reply. It was too late; in the presence of this attentive listener he could not refuse Dr. Z what suddenly, in a curious fashion, appeared to be a favor, the favor of letting him operate on him. The abominable doctor smiled again, lightly, and tapped the foot of the bed in a negligent gesture that seemed to imply a mixture of contempt and approbation, as if he had had little doubt of the outcome of this conflict between them but was nevertheless satisfied to have won.

  On the way up to the operating room, being wheeled breezily along by an orderly humming “Who?” the young man had a sudden clear sharp sense of all that he had omitted to do to attach himself to the life of this corridor from which now, irrecoverably perhaps, he thought in panic, he was being trundled away. “Stop,” he asserted faintly, raising his head on the pallet. The idea of defending himself still reached him as from a distance through the drug: Mr. Ciccone, he thought, would never have permitted this; in Mr. Ciccone, he considered tenderly, he had an ally, a veteran aider and abettor. Why, he demanded of himself, had he not taken the simple friendly course, yesterday, when he was sitting up in a chair, of offering to join his neighbor in a game of casino?

  The orderly had paused to look down at him. “What’s the matter, chum?” he inquired. The young man struggled up from the
confining blankets. They were waiting for the elevator, he realized; it was not too late, if he were insistent, to make a date with Mr. Ciccone for this afternoon or tomorrow; the fact that this notion was absurd made it appear to him all the more urgent and necessary, all the more talismanic. He jerked his raised head in the direction of Mr. Ciccone’s room. “I must speak to the patient in Number Three,” he pronounced, with an effect of hauteur and dignity. The orderly lifted shaggy red eyebrows, peered down the elevator shaft, shrugged, and consentingly set the stretcher in motion, retracing their way along the corridor. “Friend of yours?” he remarked.

  In the flush of this victory over self and custom, the young man grew excited and voluble; a passing nurse turned back to look at them. “No,” he said. “To tell the truth, I’ve never actually seen him.” The orderly stared and bumped the stretcher to a standstill, but they were already opposite Number Three. The screen had been moved and the young man hastily nerved himself for the possibility that the real Mr. Ciccone might be something quite different from what he had imagined—a cantankerous misanthrope, for example, who would repulse his overture. But to his surprise the shaded room across the way into which his dilated eyes stared was empty, the bed made up and flat.

  Fifteen minutes later, the young man expired under the anesthetic, before the operation proper had begun, the first case of its kind, as Dr. Z explained to Mrs. X, that he had ever come across in his entire practice, where the heart, without organic defect, sound as a bell, in fact, simply stopped beating.

  II

  Yonder Peasant, Who Is He?

  WHENEVER WE CHILDREN came to stay at my grandmother’s house, we were put to sleep in the sewing room, a bleak, shabby, utilitarian rectangle, more office than bedroom, more attic than office, that played to the hierarchy of chambers the role of a poor relation. It was a room seldom entered by the other members of the family, seldom swept by the maid, a room without pride; the old sewing machine, some cast-off chairs, a shadeless lamp, rolls of wrapping paper, piles of cardboard boxes that might someday come in handy, papers of pins, and remnants of material united with the iron folding cots put out for our use and the bare floor boards to give an impression of intense and ruthless temporality. Thin white spreads, of the kind used in hospitals and charity institutions, and naked blinds at the windows reminded us of our orphaned condition and of the ephemeral character of our visit; there was nothing here to encourage us to consider this our home.

  Poor Roy’s children, as commiseration damply styled the four of us, could not afford illusions, in the family opinion. Our father had put us beyond the pale by dying suddenly of influenza and taking our young mother with him, a defection that was remarked on with horror and grief commingled, as though our mother had been a pretty secretary with whom he had wantonly absconded into the irresponsible paradise of the hereafter. Our reputation was clouded by this misfortune. There was a prevailing sense, not only in the family but among storekeepers, servants, streetcar conductors, and other satellites of our circle, that my grandfather, a rich man, had behaved with extraordinary munificence in allotting a sum of money for our support and installing us with some disagreeable middle-aged relations in a dingy house two blocks distant from his own. What alternative he had was not mentioned; presumably he could have sent us to an orphan asylum and no one would have thought the worse of him. At any rate, it was felt, even by those who sympathized with us, that we led a privileged existence, privileged because we had no rights, and the very fact that at the yearly Halloween or Christmas party given at the home of an uncle we appeared so dismal, ill clad, and unhealthy, in contrast to our rosy, exquisite cousins, confirmed the judgment that had been made on us—clearly, it was a generous impulse that kept us in the family at all. Thus, the meaner our circumstances, the greater seemed our grandfather’s condescension, a view in which we ourselves shared, looking softly and shyly on this old man—with his rheumatism, his pink face and white hair, set off by the rosebuds in his Pierce-Arrow and in his buttonhole—as the font of goodness and philanthropy, and the nickel he occasionally gave us to drop into the collection plate on Sunday (two cents was our ordinary contribution) filled us not with envy but with simple admiration for his potency; this indeed was princely, this was the way to give. It did not occur to us to judge him for the disparity of our styles of living. Whatever bitterness we felt was kept for our actual guardians, who, we believed, must be embezzling the money set aside for us, since the standard of comfort achieved in our grandparents’ house—the electric heaters, the gas logs, the lap robes, the shawls wrapped tenderly about the old knees, the white meat of chicken and red meat of beef, the silver, the white tablecloths, the maids, and the solicitous chauffeur—persuaded us that prunes and rice pudding, peeling paint and patched clothes were hors concours with these persons and therefore could not have been willed by them. Wealth, in our minds, was equivalent to bounty, and poverty but a sign of penuriousness of spirit.

  Yet even if we had been convinced of the honesty of our guardians, we would still have clung to that beneficent image of our grandfather that the family myth proposed to us. We were too poor, spiritually speaking, to question his generosity, to ask why he allowed us to live in oppressed chill and deprivation at a long arm’s length from himself and hooded his genial blue eye with a bluff, millionairish gray eyebrow whenever the evidence of our suffering presented itself at his knee. The official answer we knew: our benefactors were too old to put up with four wild young children; our grandfather was preoccupied with business matters and with his rheumatism, to which he devoted himself as though to a pious duty, taking it with him on pilgrimages to Ste. Anne de Beaupré and Miami, offering it with impartial reverence to the miracle of the Northern Mother and the Southern sun. This rheumatism hallowed my grandfather with the mark of a special vocation; he lived with it in the manner of an artist or a grizzled Galahad; it set him apart from all of us and even from my grandmother, who, lacking such an affliction, led a relatively unjustified existence and showed, in relation to us children, a sharper and more bellicose spirit. She felt, in spite of everything, that she was open to criticism, and, transposing this feeling with a practiced old hand, kept peering into our characters for symptoms of ingratitude.

  We, as a matter of fact, were grateful to the point of servility. We made no demands, we had no hopes. We were content if we were permitted to enjoy the refracted rays of that solar prosperity and come sometimes in the summer afternoons to sit on the shady porch or idle through a winter morning on the wicker furniture of the sun parlor, to stare at the player piano in the music room and smell the odor of whiskey in the mahogany cabinet in the library, or to climb about the dark living room examining the glassed-in paintings in their huge gilt frames, the fruits of European travel: dusky Italian devotional groupings, heavy and lustrous as grapes, Neapolitan women carrying baskets to market, views of Venetian canals, and Tuscan harvest scenes—secular themes that, to the Irish-American mind, had become tinged with Catholic feeling by a regional infusion from the Pope. We asked no more from this house than the pride of being connected with it, and this was fortunate for us, since my grandmother, a great adherent of the give-them-an-inch-and-they’ll-take-a-yard theory of hospitality, never, so far as I can remember, offered any caller the slightest refreshment, regarding her own conversation as sufficiently wholesome and sustaining. An ugly, severe old woman with a monstrous balcony of a bosom, she officiated over certain set topics in a colorless singsong, like a priest intoning a Mass, topics to which repetition had lent a senseless solemnity: her audience with the Holy Father; how my own father had broken with family tradition and voted the Democratic ticket; a visit to Lourdes; the Sacred Stairs in Rome, bloodstained since the first Good Friday, which she had climbed on her knees; my crooked little fingers and how they meant I was a liar; a miracle-working bone; the importance of regular bowel movements; the wickedness of Protestants; the conversion of my mother to Catholicism; and the assertion that my Protestant grandmother must ce
rtainly dye her hair. The most trivial reminiscences (my aunt’s having hysterics in a haystack) received from her delivery and from the piety of the context a strongly monitory flavor; they inspired fear and guilt, and one searched uncomfortably for the moral in them, as in a dark and riddling fable.

  Luckily, I am writing a memoir and not a work of fiction, and therefore I do not have to account for my grandmother’s unpleasing character and look for the Oedipal fixation or the traumatic experience which would give her that clinical authenticity that is nowadays so desirable in portraiture. I do not know how my grandmother got the way she was; I assume, from family photographs and from the inflexibility of her habits, that she was always the same, and it seems as idle to inquire into her childhood as to ask what was ailing Iago or look for the error in toilet-training that was responsible for Lady Macbeth. My grandmother’s sexual history, bristling with infant mortality in the usual style of her period, was robust and decisive: three tall, handsome sons grew up, and one attentive daughter. Her husband treated her kindly. She had money, many grandchildren, and religion to sustain her. White hair, glasses, soft skin, wrinkles, needlework—all the paraphernalia of motherliness were hers; yet it was a cold, grudging, disputatious old woman who sat all day in her sunroom making tapestries from a pattern, scanning religious periodicals, and setting her iron jaw against any infraction of her ways.

  Combativeness was, I suppose, the dominant trait in my grandmother’s nature. An aggressive churchgoer, she was quite without Christian feeling; the mercy of the Lord Jesus had never entered her heart. Her piety was an act of war against the Protestant ascendancy. The religious magazines on her table furnished her not with food for meditation but with fresh pretexts for anger; articles attacking birth control, divorce, mixed marriages, Darwin, and secular education were her favorite reading. The teachings of the Church did not interest her, except as they were a rebuke to others; “Honor thy father and thy mother,” a commandment she was no longer called upon to practice, was the one most frequently on her lips. The extermination of Protestantism, rather than spiritual perfection, was the boon she prayed for. Her mind was preoccupied with conversion, the capture of a soul for God much diverted her fancy—it made one less Protestant in the world. Foreign missions with their overtones of good will and social service, appealed to her less strongly; it was not a harvest of souls that my grandmother had in mind.