Mary McCarthy

by Mary McCarthy

  “You misunderstand Furness, I think,” answered Domna in a low, serious voice. “He likes you but fears you don’t like him. He has a bad character and longs to be loved. As to whether he would tell Cathy”—she shrugged, rather dispiritedly—“what is the use of arguing? I think not, but how shall I prove it?” She shrugged again. “Naturally, if you don’t wish it, we won’t do it that way.” She spoke in a flat, stubborn voice, but her breast rose in a sigh, in memory of the work lost. “But I must tell you frankly,” she added, as if compelled by conscience, “that if you refuse to do it our way, you will probably be out on a limb. Many people who will support you humanly will not involve themselves gratuitously in a political mess.” “And if I do it your way?” he insinuated. Domna suddenly looked blank; she had not, plainly, thought ahead beyond her conviction of easy victory. “What do you people offer me in exchange for the risk I shall be running?” His tone was perfectly pleasant, but the question seemed to disturb her. “Offer you?” she repeated, vaguely knitting her brows. “What do you mean, Henry? That seems a most odd conception.” “What will you do,” he said, waspishly, “when Furness turns you down in the department? Does your solidarity regretfully stop there?”

  Domna once again looked hurt. “Alma and I spoke of resigning,” she finally let out, in a whisper. “Wonderful,” he absently assented, but his mind was elsewhere immediately. That was the sad thing about a confederacy: nothing was ever enough. “Just you and Alma?” he queried in a wistful tone, for already he was thinking in terms of a whole department. Domna flushed, which recalled him to the present and to the gratitude he was supposed to be showing. “Overlook my behavior,” he begged her. “I’m half crazy. I hardly know what I’m saying. Anything you want to do, of course, will be right because you decide to do it. Forgive me for questioning you at all. The defendant or victim in such cases as mine ought to be held incommunicado till his well-wishers have concluded their efforts. To be a victim or a defendant is simply inhuman. It brings out all one’s paranoia. Do whatever you think best and ignore me.” He spoke swiftly, bobbing his head in contrition, and then scrambled out of the car and hurried around to the other side to help her alight. Howard Furness, who had stopped for gas down the street, watched, behind the pump, while Mulcahy guided her solicitously into the restaurant.

  CHAPTER VI

  Lucubrations

  “LOOK HERE, Alma,” countered Howard Furness, with a light rasp in his tenor voice, “how do we know any of this is true?” The teacup on his saucer lurched and slopped as he spoke; they were drinking tea in her apartment in Linden Hall; a meeting of the full department was scheduled to begin here in a few moments, and Howard had arrived first, by design. Already, he felt captious and stubborn. “You take too much for granted,” he decreed roughly, thrusting a cigarette into his holder; like everything he did when he was jarred, this ordinary action seemed brutal and personal, a violation of frontiers. In silence, Alma passed him a little box of Vulcan matches. She was a widow of forty, small, dark, wiry, energetic, with a passion for Jane Austen and Goethe, the poles of an unusual temperament, which was at once rough-hewn and fanciful, delicate and dynamic. Twenty years ago, she had been a New Woman, of the femme savante school, and she had not been altered either by marriage or by the death of her life-companion—it was as though she had lost a congenial sister or a woman colleague with whom she had shared a flat and a small collection of books, bibelots, and common habits; having lived together with Mr. Fortune by a continuous stipulation of mutual consent, she had allowed him his independence in departing. She dressed in jerseys and wool skirts and brogues, wore a boyish haircut and necklaces of turquoise or Mexican silver, was fond of tea, little Cuban cheroots, Players, English Ovals, candied ginger, and so on. In the spring, she picked the first violets; in the autumn, a bouquet of wild grasses, which stood all winter on her mantel in a brass container. She was both extremely outspoken and extremely reserved; her personality was posted with all sorts of No Trespassing signs and crisscrossed with electric fences, which repelled the intruder with a smart shock. To men, in particular, the protocol of her nature was bewildering, like court etiquette; like a queen, too, she had her favorites, who were permitted familiarities and indulgences not granted to their superiors in rank or outward attainments—at Jocelyn, this footstool position was occupied by Henry Mulcahy and his dependents.

  Howard Furness was a friend of Alma’s, but she pricked him continually, like a nettle. Her black, wizened, peppercorn eyes regarded him with a permanent twinkle which anticipated his weakness and shriveled his independence; she would seldom speak to him seriously, except on department business, called him “Howie,” or “little Howie,” though he stood five feet nine, or even, when specially humoring him, her “little manikin-minikin,” which suggested, and not only to Howard’s mind, a dressed department-store dummy or a ventriloquist’s puppet. In moments of peace, he endured this, but in moments of crisis, like the present one, he was driven to take up with her a peculiarly sidling and derogatory tone, full of insinuation, as though he coarsely “saw through” her, like that of a boy to his sister. And at bottom, he did murkily consider all attainment, idealism, and so forth, to be a sort of speciousness; the upper world, for him, was divided into admitted frauds, hypocritical frauds, unconscious frauds: this fraudulence, in fact, to his glazed-pottery-blue eye, constituted the human, and below it was only animal activity, which was of no interest or amusement to the observer. Every relationship, therefore, propelled itself for him toward confession and mutual self-exposure; the slurrings and elisions of his voice conspired to this end; even in his ingratiating mood, his talk had a sidelong motion, suggestive of complicity. At the same time, he had a firm sense of what was reasonable and proper, of the Palladian façade of appearances and observances, a sense which was at present aggrieved by the farrago of incoherent accusation which was being offered him in all earnestness by a woman of supposedly critical temper; his jealousy of Mulcahy was sharpened by creative envy—to what lengths would sheer audacity carry the man?

  Yet his natural envy, as of a fellow safe-cracker, together with a respect for the laws of slander, imposed on him a code, if not of silence, at any rate of restraint. He would do no more than restively hint his belief that Hen was lying, and this made him irritable, since nobody, he knew, would credit him with a voluntary act of abstention, but, on the contrary, everyone would gladly misjudge him and suppose that careerist motives kept him from supporting a colleague whom actually he distrusted for impersonal reasons and in the end from a sense of proportion. He made a deft little grimace and pushed his cup aside. “Let’s try to keep our heads,” he advised, with a worldly flourish of the cigarette-holder. “We’re all sorry for Cathy, but that’s the risk Hen has run. Frankly,” he shrugged, “the human angle leaves me rather cold. We all have our hard-luck stories, and Cathy was Hen’s lookout.” A peculiar, provocative smile had become affixed to his features, and his voice had a ring of defiance; in this atmosphere of coddling, he felt it his duty to vaunt himself as a particularly hard-boiled egg, but he found a cool pleasure in the role that outstripped his corrective intention; the desire to be original passed, through justification, into a positive wish to offend.

  “In Maynard’s place,” he rather airily announced, “I should have acted sooner. For six months, at least, our friend Hen has been asking to be fired, and today he finally got what he was looking for. I’m not interested in his Party membership, or the meetings he went to; the more fool he, if he didn’t break with the Party when the breaking was good.” His voice had begun to rise, despite himself; Alma’s assessing silence worked on him like a reproach. “What you fine people choose to ignore,” he said, curbing himself, “is the academic record. In the two years he’s been here, how many times has he turned in his achievement sheets on schedule? Or reported class absences? Or filled in the field-period reports? How many conferences has Hen missed? Have you any idea?” In reply, Alma slightly lifted her shoulders, as though
to deprecate all this as immaterial. There was a knock on the door, and Aristide softly entered; with an air of great precaution, like a late theatre-goer who fears to interrupt the performance, he tiptoed across the room and lowered himself onto the Empire sofa. As Howard’s indictment continued, his mild, smooth, benign face, like a Swiss weather-clock, registered a variety of alarmed expressions, from administrative pain to total mystification; this recital of quotidian misdemeanors affected him like a traveler’s tale, an account of strange customs prevailing among unfathomable peoples. “Last summer,” Howard concluded, with a sweep of the white cuff, “seven of Hen’s students wrote me, wanting their projects back. The others apparently didn’t care.” He gave a little laugh, in tribute to his normal skepticism. “We have some duty to the students, I assume. Little Elmendorf, let me remind you, nearly didn’t graduate last year when Hen mislaid her thesis and insisted, in the department, that it had never been turned in.” He quirked an eyebrow. “We know enough elementary Freud by this time to see the psychopathology of that. Little Elmendorf’s father, as we have cause to remember, was a trustee.”

  He suddenly gave vent to a wholly unpremeditated and rather concessive laugh. A truant sympathy for Hen made his argument sway and topple, just as he reached to crown it—his public positions were always unsteady, being built up, block by wooden block, like a child’s tower, out of what he held to be correct and fitting; a mere stir in the ambience or an inner restlessness could unbalance him. In this case, it was the presence of Aristide, perturbedly nodding and deploring, and the recollection of Elmendorf Senior, a beetling kulak of the region, that brought a glint of malice to his eye. The subversive he acknowledged in himself was all at once irresistibly appealed to by Hen’s consistent vagaries of character. One side of Howard, his best, the side that drew his students, was an airy sybarite in the moral sphere and behaved as a sort of prodigious host, officiating, somewhat in the background, over the great banquet of life and letters, calling in the dancing-girls and the poets, drunken Alcibiades and simple Agathon, applauding each turn without invidious distinction; in this mood, he wore a garland perpetually round his neck; his collar was loosened, his blue stare moist with afflatus; he cried, Encore, encore; and his methodology was simply reductive: he considered Socrates to be a man and mortal. The indignation he had felt, just now, with Mulcahy, tacked as it neared the ethical and sought another route for its expression. He took a more pacific tone and, thrusting his rather undershot jaw out, said, “God knows, Alma, I don’t enjoy playing the Christer. Minding Hen’s p’s and q’s is not my idea of a picnic. But let’s face up to the facts here. If you’ve got to champion Hen out of personal loyalty, that’s your affair; each to his own taste. Take it up with Maynard; I won’t stop you. But for God’s sake, if you must go into it, do it with your eyes open.”

  There was a second knock on the door. Aristide leaned forward. “Excuse me, Alma,” he interjected, “Ellison asked me to tell you that he was sick in bed.” Alma gave a snort; Herbert Ellison, the young poet of the department, who taught verse-writing and modern poetry, was never on hand when needed; she suspected him of moral cowardice or of an intellectual superiority to the mundane, which amounted to the same thing. Domna Rejnev and Van Tour came into the room together and without a word took seats, side by side, as if pledged to a common intransigence. “Let’s not kid ourselves,” Furness exclaimed, paying no attention to them and continuing, deliberately, from where he had left off, “Hen’s appointment is not being terminated for political misbehavior. If Hen was ever a Party member, this is the first Maynard or anybody else ever knew of it.” He paused to let this sink in, together with its implications, and his eye inadvertently met Domna’s; she was staring at him with an expression of such cold ferocity that he shivered and lost track of what he had meant to say. He had been steeling himself for the last half-hour against just this look of hers, which he had precisely anticipated, but which nevertheless made him quail. His soul, however, stiffened obstinately; he was half in love with Domna, or so he kept telling himself, and this drove him, tactically, to resist her. “I don’t delude myself,” he cried, with a certain resolved desperation that brought all eyes but Domna’s curiously to rest on him, as if for once he spoke directly from the heart, “I know what you’re thinking!” Domna turned him her profile in a gesture of contempt. “That I’m behind this dismissal, that I’m jealous of Hen, that I’m a trimmer”—he made a slight ironic bow to Alma, who was fond of using this word. “Believe me,” he glanced at Domna, who kept her head averted, “Maynard didn’t consult me. If he had consulted me . . .” He shrugged. “What would you have had me say? What would you have said in my place if you had been nearly two years acting as a buffer, between Hen and the bursar and the registrar, between Hen and his tutees, between Hen and the Jocund, between Hen and the student council? If other departments had complained to you about Hen’s raids on their students?”

  Aristide cleared his throat; Domna’s pink lips parted and swiftly closed again; she took out a pencil and began to draw, indifferently, in her notebook; Alma coughed, a quick, shrill, peppery cough that at once earned her the right to answer. “No need to quarrel,” she said tersely, and the room came to order. Her voice was like a pointer, moving sharply on a map or blackboard, which gave her an air of authoritative impersonality, though as a matter of fact she was congenitally nervous and suffered from intermittent eczema, asthma, shingles, and all the usual disorders of the repressed female brain-worker. Her neck, as she spoke, reddened and she coughed, from time to time, awkwardly. “We have a simple difference of opinion. We differ, apparently, as to Henry’s professional qualifications. We indorse him; you do not. That’s the nub of the matter. The political question is secondary. Nobody has the right to teach merely because he is or was a Communist—on that we can all surely agree?” All heads promptly nodded but Domna’s. “You disagree?” swiftly asked Alma. “ ‘Nobody has the right to be a policeman,’ ” quoted Domna, rather slowly. “I am not sure. In principle . . . yes . . . no. I am not sure.” A heavy frown appeared on her forehead; everyone turned to look at her in perplexity. Domna’s thought-processes, as they all knew, were rather lengthy and tortuous; Van Tour heaved a sigh. “Let’s say you temporarily abstain,” put in Alma, kindly. “The point need not come up unless Howie persuades us that Henry is unfit to teach on academic grounds. I think we would all say, however, that membership in the Communist Party, past or present, does not in itself establish unfitness to teach.” Aristide revolved this statement. “Well now, Alma,” he allowed, “I am not sure you have the correct formulation. Intellectual freedom—that is the usual point, isn’t it? Can a Communist under discipline have intellectual freedom? We hear that they cannot, that they are under strict orders to promote their infamous doctrine; their minds are not free as ours are.” Van Tour interrupted, excitedly. “Catholics are not free either,” he protested with heat. Like many teachers of English, he was not able to think very clearly and responded, like a conditioned watch-dog, to certain sets of words which he found vaguely inimical; in an argument he was seldom able to discriminate between a friend and a foe, the main contention and a side-issue. With a person of his temperament, a statement of preliminary axioms, such as Alma had been attempting, was fatal. He was now under the impression that Aristide was slurring Mulcahy; a mid-western distrust of foreign languages, moreover, led him to associate Aristide, who was a Protestant, with the ukases of the Vatican. “Catholics believe in a single truth, too,” he cried, warming. “They only tolerate opposition in countries where they haven’t taken over the government. Look at Spain! Why should we let them teach when we won’t allow it to Communists?” “Hear, hear!” remarked Howard, amused. “No one has intellectual freedom,” asserted Domna suddenly, in a vicious, smoldering tone.

  Alma coughed and resumed control of the discussion. “Let me re-frame the point. Past membership in the Communist Party does not in itself establish unfitness to teach.” “Aye, aye,” cried Van
Tour. Aristide nodded. “Hence,” pursued Alma, “if we can agree that Henry possesses the necessary academic qualifications, we will be in a position to argue that his dismissal be reconsidered, (a) in view of the present discriminatory practices in the colleges, which will make him, if fired, virtually unemployable, (b) in view of his own admission of former membership in the Communist Party, which, in the absence of direct evidence of his incompetence, suggests at any rate that political discrimination may have been exercised here against him.” Howard withdrew his tongue from his cheek and whistled. “Very discreet, Alma,” he commended. “You make no concrete charges, bring forward no evidence, and merely counsel Maynard to avoid the appearance of evil. I take my hat off. May you mediate for me when my hour comes.” He blew her a congratulatory kiss. “Agreed,” retorted Alma, absently. “Alma,” put in Aristide, “a single correction, if I may. Strictly speaking, Henry is not being fired. His contract is not being renewed, a rather different thing where future employment is concerned. I presume that you are using the expression loosely, as a sort of shorthand, and, so long as we all understand that, it may be convenient to do so.”

  Alma nodded. “Now, whatever we think ourselves, Maynard will undoubtedly tell us that Henry is not being fired, as you say, Aristide, but being let out for routine administrative reasons. What’s more, he will mean it, I assure you. If Maynard has fired Henry for political activities, he has no conscious idea he has done so. Therefore, it devolves on us to give him our opinion that Henry is professionally competent and deprive him of the psychological basis for treating the problem as a purely routine incident. And, as Howie points out, it is possible that Maynard has been acting in good faith and knows nothing of the Party membership. In which case, the vigorous protest of Henry’s department ought to open his eyes to what appears to be a flagrant injustice. Now, Howard,” she said pleasantly, with an air of “drawing him out,” “you are in disagreement with the rest of us. You do not think Henry competent for a number of reasons which you have cited and which, so far as they go, we are prepared to accept, I think, without further question. The head of the department, we will all agree, is in a position to have a certain kind of knowledge of a teacher’s routine work and routine failures which the rest of us, happily, are spared. We will all admit, I think, that Henry has been lax, but which of us here, I wonder, is in a position to cast the first stone?” Her shot-like eyes peppered them; she folded her muscular hands in her lap. “Not I,” said Van Tour eagerly. “I’m always late with my achievement sheets. My students are forever after me to return their little term papers.” He flapped a white hand in the air. “And the complaints I’ve had from the registrar’s office!” He heaved his shoulders in their suede jacket and sent his eyes to heaven. “Nor I,” exclaimed Domna. “You know yourself, Howard,” she chided him, “that I forget to record class absences. And my library history is shocking. I never remember,” she earnestly told them, “to put the books on reserve.” “We all have our peccadilloes,” warmly declared Aristide, “I remember one of my students—do you recall the case, Alma?—Hyslop, I believe the name was, who was doing a paper for me on Victor Hugo or was it Dumas fils?” His large flat lips stretched and tightened around the proper names, like a rubber band contracting; he had never anglicized a French word in all his professional history, with the single considered exception of Paris.