Mary McCarthy

by Mary McCarthy

  And yet to the Jocelyn boy who suffered himself to attend these dances the Mulcahys were both “regular” guys. These youths, for the most part, were still squirming in the straitjacket of puberty; their hands trembled when they lit a cigarette; their wrists protruded from their coat-sleeves; they lived in an existential extremity; every instant of communication was anguish. Besides the beer-and-convertible crowd—the ex-bootleggers’ and racketeers’ sons, movie-agents’ sons, the heavy-walleted incorrigible sons of advertising geniuses who had been advised to try Jocelyn as a last resort—the male part of the college included an unusual number of child prodigies, mathematical wizards of fourteen, as well as some spastics and paraplegics, cripples of various sorts, boys with tics, polio victims. There were a deaf boy, a dumb boy, boys with several kinds of speech-defects; there were two boys who had fits, boys with unusual skin diseases, with ordinary acne, with glasses, with poor teeth, a boy with a religious complex, boys who had grown too fast, with long, chickeny necks and quivering Adam’s apples. The girls, by comparison, were blooming, healthy, often pretty specimens, with the usual desires and values, daughters of commercial artists, commercial writers, radio-singers, insurance-salesmen, dermatologists, girls who had failed to get into Smith or nearby Swarthmore, girls from the surrounding region, narcissistic, indolent girls wanting a good time and not choosey, girls who sculpted or did ceramics of animals or fashion-drawing, hard-driving, liverish girls, older than the rest, on scholarships.

  This disparity between boys and girls created an awkwardness at the dances that made them seem like children’s parties, an enforced or legislated pleasure—the girls consciously exercised charity; the boys yielded to coercion. Under the Mulcahys’ auspices, however, all this took on a positive character. Those who were recruited came back again with a growing confidence that such wholesome pastimes were licit, superior, in fact, to the brute pastimes of the majority. The division of labor between husband and wife provided reassurance both to the boys who danced badly and the girls whose feet they stepped on; it gave an authoritative precedent for the differences between the sexes. With Dr. Mulcahy as a model, appearances lost their terrors. A stammer, a cast in the eye invested a cheese-faced boy with clerkly functions—he squinted on his partner from a knot-hole of male assurance.

  Catherine Mulcahy, moreover, had a womanly, Irish way with her that put the boys at their ease. She was only thirty-one and light on her feet; she had a low, warm encouraging laugh; she remembered first names and nicknames, parents’ occupations, where one had gone to school, what one thought of it, where one went for the summer; she was the sort of person who was interested in your birthday, and who could tell you what sign you were born under, your birthstone, and the patron saint of the day. Like the hefty, bantering nurses who helped you undress in the family doctor’s office and knew your weight and how much you had grown in a year and your favorite movie-star, she had a sort of expertise in the gross data of your history that both made you uncomfortable and vaguely stimulated you, as though a cool hand, plumping your biography, patted the secret tissue of your being.

  Henry Mulcahy, on the contrary, had no humor or small talk. He impressed the group of boys present with his indefatigable seriousness. Standing by the buffet, he allowed himself to be bombarded with questions, like a pitcher emerging from a ball-park or a great man arriving on the Queen Mary: “Dr. Mulcahy, what do you think of Whitehead? Do you accept Vico’s cyclical theory? Do you follow Freud or Jung? How do you stand on the veto?” He dispatched each query in turn, coolly, methodologically, meting out his thought in measured lengths, his reddish head bent attentively sideward to his questioner, as though to catch the precise phrasing of the order. Only the athletic coach, speaking of batting averages, winning infield combinations, end-runs, had an exactitude as tireless and considered as Dr. Mulcahy’s, a willingness to be tapped by all comers, as he sat crouched in the shed in his windbreaker. Like the coach, Dr. Mulcahy was sometimes tetchy, irritable with flim-flam and trifling; his mind was on twenty-four-hour patrol against incursions of the vague and the unformulated—women’s talk. In this touch of paranoia, the boys recognized themselves: the masculine principle. Here, while the music played, drifts of boys surrounded him; partners edged off the dance-floor—“Come on, I want to hear this”—listened, and danced again. A senior girl’s voice, plaintive, “Dr. Mulcahy, really, do we have to believe in orgones?” A racketeer’s son, guffawing, pulling his girl forward, “This, I gotta know.” But such questions and such auditors displeased him. He drew himself up; his fists clenched; his moon-pale face darkened; in or out of the classroom, he declined to discuss sex with adolescents. “Take your bull-session to the social room; I refuse to be baited and you know it.”

  He made enemies thus and he welcomed it, welcomed it all the more because those who at one time or another he had to exclude from the dance-floor belonged almost always to the wealthier classes or to one of the powerful factions that ran the campus newspaper or the student-government association. Following such an outburst, the concise smile that hovered on his lips would grow more effulgent as his eye traced the offender out of the hall to the coatroom. His voice, resuming the conversation, was breathy with satisfaction, as though he had been running for a train and caught it. A messenger was sent to Catherine with a bulletin of reassurance: “Tell her, ‘don’t worry, Dr. Mulcahy says; everything has been taken care of.’ ” The boys left behind in the circle eyed each other embarrassed; they observed in the teacher a demand for congratulation that left them cold and stony—sufficiency was what they expected of adults. Yet in the long run the blame, they felt, lay more with those who provoked him than with Dr. Mulcahy himself. He was a good scout, they reasoned out later huskily among themselves, if you knew how to handle him, and, having pointed this out to each other, with recourse to many examples, they vaunted themselves on having found the knack.

  Reports of such incidents naturally circulated. The younger group who attended the dances knew that it was said that Mulcahy wantonly tyrannized over them, that his caprices interfered with their normal pleasures and outlets. This flattered them, whenever they heard it, by making them feel “bigger” than the people who took their cause up, so that their denials had a certain unction: “Don’t worry about us, Mr. Fraenkel, Mr. Furness; we love it; really we do.” The effect was to draw together a little band of truth-seekers who met to tell each the latest, viz., the newest stupidity or distortion. Such slanders or crazy conjectures, the students noted, were especially rife in the Social Sciences Division. Mr. Fraenkel, for example, in Contemporary History, who tutored one of Sheila’s roommates, Lilia Jones, had gone so far as to wonder in conference whether Mulcahy might not have some sort of “hold” on the dance-committee—“a threat, conceivably, Lilia, to lower somebody’s grade?”

  Pink Lilia recounting this interview to her fellow-committee-members spoke in a tense whisper; her fat ringed fingers gripped the conference table of the little room in Students’ basement. “I told him,” she protested, wailing, “that we wanted Dr. Mulcahy, that we loved Mrs. Mulcahy and liked to see her get away from the children. But he just wouldn’t believe me. ‘I can understand, Lilia, that you wouldn’t want to hurt their feelings.’ ” “Fraenkel’s got it in for Mulcahy,” hoarsely summed up a boy’s voice. But Lilia would not allow her tutor to be reduced to a motive; a staunch Social Science major, she saw both sides of every question. “No,” she said, thoughtfully, relinquishing her babyish manner. “I think you simplify. I believe he was trying to help us. He’s a younger man himself, a product of the Roosevelt years, and so he doesn’t understand, just because he’s so close to us, that our generation wants something different, more guidance, more control. Dr. Mulcahy,” she concluded, somewhat primly, “is far enough away from us to see us as we are.” “A-a-ah, what a raw deal, though!” cried another boy, wearily, making a face of disgust. “What’s the guy done that they’re always after him, hounding him, grilling you about him in conference? I
t stinks.” The committee looked at each other, feeling that something definite was called for. “Do you think we should tell him?” ventured a second girl. “No!” exploded the boy. “ ‘All so eager to make trouble,’ ” he mimicked them. “Leave him alone!”

  Thus it happened that without his knowledge, a silent and even expectant cordon of sympathy had been drawn around Mulcahy and his family. The students had no way of guessing that he would or could be fired; they simply feared the worst, hopelessly, without denominating what it was. The sight of his old gray Plymouth sedan plying the icy back roads at all hours of the day and night, fetching groceries and drugs from the village, sitters from the college, laundry from a Mrs. Schmittlap in a farmhouse, affected his sympathizers with a sort of helpless consternation and humorous wry affection. The very weather, it seemed, was against him. Everything conspired. They heard rumors of unpaid bills, importunate tradesmen, radiators that had burst from the cold, sickness. The old car was a cartoon of man’s afflictions, out of Job by Laurel and Hardy. The roof leaked; the front window was missing; the windshield wiper was broken; the fuel-pump coughed; he was obliged to park on a hill to be sure of getting started. In town, coming out of the movies, four or five students would turn to and push him from the parking-lot where he was stalled. The tires were worn smooth, and the boys who sometimes accompanied him home to fix the furnace or shovel out the driveway could not teach him that the proper thing was to keep your foot off the brake and steer into the skid, so that in consequence he was dependent on the tow-truck and a surly garage-proprietor to whom he already owed money. Walking through the snow to telephone, he continually caught cold. His classes were accustomed to broken appointments, to the typed notice on the door, “Dr. Mulcahy will not be able to meet his students today. See assignment notice in the library.”

  And yet in the darkening afternoons, when he chugged up to the Co-op with Mrs. Mulcahy and the children, leaving the motor running while he hurried them in to the counter for an after-school treat, ice-cream cones and Nabs all around, he and his wife, their noses white-tipped from the cold, were always brisk and merry. The Co-op’s prices, a current campus scandal, meant nothing to him at such moments; he paid festively, without demur, whispering in a child’s ear to offer the temptation of seconds, an Oreo, Necco wafers. In the smoky, crowded room his children whined a great deal, had the ball of ice-cream knocked from their cones, screamed, stamped their feet, clutched the crotch of their snowsuits and cried to go to the bathroom, but he, who flew off the handle so readily in his classes, was in this aspect unfailingly soothing and remedial. “Daddy will spank,” he chastised in his honeyed, wheedling voice, but he did not mean it; he would tap a sticky hand lightly with his fingers. The worn, scolding formulae of parenthood were frequently on his lips, but speciously, almost sycophantically, as an exudation of love: Nora was “naughty,” he coddled; Mary Margaret, “a bad girl,” and Daddy would “tell” Mummy on her, while his freckled hand strayed over the pigtails and his mouth puckered for a kiss. If a child cried, he “punished” whatever had offended it (“bad table,” “bad rough boy, did he jostle her?”) or else discovered “a sore place” and promised to have Mummy kiss it and “make it all well again.” The little girls thus formed the habit of striking him whenever they were angry with him, a thing that caused child-study majors and potential sitters to quirk their eyebrows telegraphically over their cokes or coffee, yet even they, watching him play hurt in turn (“acting out the inner tensions”) were moved to marvel aloud at his extraordinary patience and selflessness; not many fathers of this era would suffer children so cheerfully.

  Mulcahy himself, just now, in speaking as he had to Sheila McKay, had slowly become aware of the sentimental appeal of his four children, four motherless children, he absently fancied them, so orphaned did he see them in her eyes. He had not fully appreciated, until he began to improvise, what a responsibility he had to his family. He had been speaking thoughtlessly, at random, out of the welter of gloomy associations induced by the President’s letter. The girl’s response brought him to his senses. He saw at once that to any normal onlooker the central point of interest in his dismissal would be the effect on Catherine and the children.

  This obliged him to rearrange his emotions; he would not deny that, man-like, he had been laggard in marital feeling; an adolescent had set him to rights. Catherine’s health, always a matter of concern to him, now abruptly became paramount. He had no right, he remorsefully acknowledged, to inflict a new worry on her at a time when her strength was depleted. On no account must Catherine know; he rehearsed the prescription to himself, until he felt it inhere in him, like a natural, spontaneous anxiety. No worry, rest, light exercise—the warnings of doctors, reactivated, chorused sedulously in his ears. As if in deference to her condition, he lowered the pitch of his feeling; his thoughts went on tiptoe, gently, circling round her as he had seen her last that morning, milk-pale, dangling a toy over the sick child in its makeshift crib. The term, heart murmur, tumbled at him out of a disordered memory—was it herself or young Stephen she had been speaking of?

  “I will not answer for the consequences”—his thought grimly fastened on this phrase which he had heard in so many movies that he could not recall whether it had actually been pronounced to him by one of the family’s many physicians or whether it was simply the gist, the hard core of what they had kept telling him. And to think, he said to himself, parenthetically, that he had once called this “meddling,” “interference between man and wife.” He brought his fist quietly down on the desk. He had known for the last five minutes, ever since the door had shut on Sheila, leaving, that he had Hoar on the griddle: he held him personally responsible for the life of his wife and/or child. He repeated the words with considered savagery, biting them off one by one, as though to say, Play that on your guitar.

  He felt convinced, all at once, that Hoar had chosen, deliberately, to strike at him through Catherine. The letter was a mere move in a game designed to bring him to heel. Hoar knew very well what the shock might do to a woman with her kidney condition; to know such things, in fact, was his business as an administrator. Hoar had no real plan of firing him (that, actually, had been clear from the beginning); he wished simply to hear him plead, promise good behavior, learn his lesson. Mulcahy’s jaw set. Was he to come before this Pharisee as a petitioner, pleading for a woman’s life? For a moment his soul clearly countenanced the idea of killing wife and child, or, rather, of letting wife and child perish for the sake of an illimitable freedom. He knew himself capable of it and then gave way with a short laugh. “ ‘Springes to catch woodcocks,’ ” he remarked, lightly aspersing the old conflict between love and duty. The lethal decision, he perceived, was not his but the President’s, and Hoar was not equal to it. Smiling sharply, he locked his desk, opened the door into the corridor, found it empty, locked his door and, dropping the key into his pocket, hurried on tiptoe down to the little wing at the end, where his two friends and also Catherine’s friends, Mrs. Fortune and Miss Rejnev, had their offices.

  CHAPTER III

  Mea Culpa

  “MAY I SPEAK to you, Domna, for a moment?” Cautiously, like the emissary of his body, Henry Mulcahy’s head protruded into the Russian girl’s office, around the edge of the door, which had opened noiselessly to admit it, while Miss Rejnev and her boy-tutee, forewarned by a slight creaking in the hall a moment earlier, sat transfixed, as in a horror-film, watching the knob turn. Domna frowned and looked at her wrist-watch; she was new enough to teaching to have a puritan sense of duty to her students; she disapproved of interruptions during the tutorial hour; yet Henry Mulcahy for her was invariably a special case, precisely because he was contemned, despised, importunate, and a clever man withal. She hesitated. “I can come back a little later,” he vouchsafed, twirling the doorknob and swinging the door on its hinges. “I can come back, Miss Rejnev,” put in the boy-student, eagerly resolving the difficulty. But this munificence, in its turn, annoyed her; the be
tter Jocelyn student, like this one, was all too accommodating, ready to be put off, to anticipate faculty weakness and serve it sedulously, like a cause. “Could you wait five minutes, please, in the corridor?” she said to Henry abruptly, in a voice that mixed apology with severity. In exactly six minutes, she reopened the door, and the tall student passed through it, smiling. “Next!” he said to Mulcahy, with a wink.

  Domna Rejnev was the youngest member of the Literature department, a Radcliffe B.A., twenty-three years old, teaching Russian literature and French. To deter familiarities, she wore a plain smock in her office that gave her something of the look of a young woman scientist or interne. Her grandfather had been a famous Liberal, one of the leaders of the Cadet party in the Duma; her father, a well-educated man, a friend of Cocteau and Diaghileff, sold jewelry for a firm in Paris. She herself was a smoldering anachronism, a throwback to one of those ardent young women of the Sixties, Turgenev’s heroines, who cut their curls short, studied Hegel, crossed their mammas and papas, reproved their suitors, and dreamed resolutely of “a new day” for peasants, workers, and technicians. Like her prototypes, she gave the appearance of stifling in conventional surroundings; her finely cut, mobile nostrils quivered during a banal conversation as though, literally, seeking air. Her dark, straight, glossy hair was worn short and loose, without so much as a bobby-pin; she kept ruffling an impatient hand through it to brush it back from her eyes. She had a severe, beautiful, clear-cut profile, very pure ivory skin, the color of old piano-keys; her lips, also, were finely drawn and a true natural pink or rose. Her very beauty had the quality, not of radiance or softness, but of incorruptibility; it was the beauty of an absolute or a political theorem. Unlike most advanced young women, she dressed quietly, without tendentiousness—no ballet-slippers, bangles, dirndls, flowers in the hair. She wore dark suits of rather heavy, good material, cut somewhat full in the coat-skirts: the European tailor-made. Only her eyes were an exception to this restraint and muted gravity of person; they were grey and queerly lit from within, as by some dangerous electricity; she had a startling intensity of gaze that never wavered from its object, like that of a palmist or a seer. Her voice, on the contrary, was low, concise, and even; a slight English boarding-school accent overlaid a Russian harshness.