Mary McCarthy

by Mary McCarthy

  “Well, come on, what are we waiting for? We can outvote him,” proclaimed Van Tour, as everyone else hesitated. Aristide intervened. “I strongly advise, Alma,” he said, “that you observe the principle of unanimity, as we’ve done in all cases touching personnel. In our own department, we’ve found it a source of discord to carry any personnel decision over the dissent of an individual member. The effects on teamwork have been quite disquieting.” Alma nodded. “I move no vote,” she suggested. Van Tour bristled. “What has Aristide got to do with this?” he complained. “I thought he was here as an observer to carry the sense of the meeting back to his own branch of the division.” “I am not voting,” Aristide pointed out. “And Domna, strictly speaking, has only half a vote, since she teaches only the one course in your department.” Van Tour threw up his hands. “That cooks it,” he declared, despondently. “What’s the use of voting? Since Alma’s gone over to the enemy, that leaves one and a half to two. What about Ellison?” he recalled. “Where is he anyway?” “In bed,” replied Alma, shortly. “All in favor of no vote?” She and Furness promptly raised their hands. “Opposed?” Van Tour waved his hand vigorously and signaled to Domna, who, however, made no move and merely stared at her fingers enlaced tightly in her lap. She was too dispirited to vote and moreover agreed with Aristide that unanimity was desirable, but a new reluctance to offend Henry made her unwilling to put this on record. “Carried,” announced Alma.

  “Good-bye, Hen,” said Van Tour bitterly, jerking on an Eskimo jacket with a big fur-lined hood. He glared at Furness as though he wished to strike him. Alma lit a cheroot. “Domna,” she called. “Before you go, I have something to show you.” She hurried over to the desk and picked up a long white envelope. “My letter to Maynard,” she said proudly. “Penned this afternoon.” The men, on their way out, paused in uneasy curiosity. “What do you mean, this afternoon?” demanded Furness loudly, sensing some animadversion on himself. Domna had opened the unsealed envelope; her eyes ran over the typed lines and then rose to meet Alma’s, a look of admiration in them; Alma, whom she liked and somewhat feared, was always a jump beyond her. “You knew how it would come out?” she said, marveling. Alma nodded. “Of course.” She glanced at Furness. “What did you expect of him, forsooth?” “Henry predicted it,” Domna whispered. Van Tour was peering over Domna’s shoulder. “You want him to see it?” the girl asked. “Why not?” said Alma, carelessly. She folded her arms and watched them. Consy gave a cry of dismay. “Alma’s resigned,” he exclaimed in horror. Aristide blanched. Furness utterly lost his self-possession. “But you should have told me,” he repeated in a peculiar tone of injury mingled with placation, “you should have told me, Alma; you should have told me, darling.” He swayed as he stood before her, as though he meant to fall down at her feet. Alma surveyed him coldly and put an arm around Domna. “I had no wish to coerce your decision, Howard, or to bargain with you. You voted as you saw best. And my own decision is final; whatever Maynard chooses to do, I shall not stay here any longer.”

  CHAPTER VII

  Oh, What a Tangled Web We Weave

  “BUT IT’S not fair to me, Alma,” argued Mulcahy the follow ing morning. He had hurried over to her office as soon as he got the news. He was in a mood to be angry with Domna, who ought to have told him at once, he contended, even though they had agreed not to communicate by telephone for fear of Cathy and her questions—“What did Domna want, dear?” The girl ought to have had the sense to realize that this was urgent and not waited to let him find out, via the campus mail, that Alma had taken a decision that imperiled his whole cause. Merely another illustration, he exclaimed savagely, as he flew across the campus, overcoat flapping, of the folly of entrusting one’s destiny to the lax attentions of outsiders—what did it matter to Domna that a trump card had just been thrown away while she slept in her virgin bedstead the sleep of the just and the idiot? Alma’s letter of resignation was by this time—he glanced despairingly at the chapel clock—waiting on Maynard’s blotter for his eminence to read. Had he himself been informed on time, it might have been possible to go through the mail-sack and remove it. Even now, he calculated, as he endeavored to drill reason into Alma’s obstinate head, there was still a chance that Maynard might be late getting to his office or away on one of his eternal fund-raising tours or addressing a forum of educators on the Spirit of Free Inquiry, ha, ha. The prudence of an official, he thought limply, ought never to be underestimated; it would not be the first occasion on which this one had taken cover to let some tempest of criticism blow over, give tempers time to cool, the counsels of moderation to prevail, etc., etc. A great one was Mr. Hoar for “letting things shake down a bit till we can view them in their true perspective.”

  Even assuming that the damage was done, that this fool Draconic letter could not be retrieved, Alma herself, in all conscience, one would think, could do something to undo its effects. It was not unreasonable, certainly, to ask of her that she go to Maynard of her own accord and explain how things really stood: that she had written hastily, in the first shock of hearing of her friend’s dismissal, but that she would be pleased to withdraw her resignation just as soon as Maynard, on his side, withdrew his own ill-considered letter of yesterday. Yet Alma, perversely, refused to see that this “final” resignation of hers was intrinsically selfish and seemed determined to persist in resigning no matter what amends Maynard made, a thing which was as unfair to Maynard as it was to himself and to the students, who had been given every reason to think that the old girl was a fixture at Jocelyn.

  “Can’t you see, Alma,” he supplicated, “that such a stand is really un-Christian?” The necessity of taking this tone filled him with impatience; he had an innate distaste for flattery, yet there seemed no other way of making an unpleasant truth palatable to a woman accustomed to dictate in her own little circumscribed sphere of fawning pupils and colleagues who feared her sharp tongue, even, to tell the truth, as he himself did a little at this moment, so that he kept going all around Robin Hood’s barn, he thought wearily, instead of coming to the point and talking to her like a Dutch uncle, which, God knows, she deserved. “You’re bent,” he gently chided, “on punishing the whole college for one man’s mistake, and for all we know, Alma—let’s be charitable—it may have been simply a mistake, an error of judgment such as all of us are liable to. Even I,” he went on earnestly, “who’ve been singled out for Maynard’s persecution, even I think it wrong to condemn Maynard unheard. It’s very Old Testament of you, like those jealous, feminine wraths of Jehovah that wanted to wipe out a whole city in return for a sin. You put me in the absurd position of the interceding prophet, pleading for our latter-day Sodom against your terrible ire. Relent toward us, stay your hand!” But this mock-heroic approach was a mistake; she merely shook her black locks, smiling, as though he had paid her a compliment, her berry-black eyes coruscating in their eternal, indulgent twinkle. “I did what I had to do,” she affirmed with a sudden faraway look, as though fixing an appointment with her destiny.

  “But what about me?” exclaimed Henry, nettled at her opacity. She kept missing the point on purpose, he thought furiously—did she want him to spell it out for her in letters a foot high? Very well, he inwardly told her, setting his teeth. You force me to speak plainly; on your own head be it. “What you don’t seem to realize, Alma,” he expostulated, “is that this gesture of yours is a disservice to the very party you intend to benefit. Your resignation, offered provisionally, can be a deterrent to Maynard. His high opinion of you, the department’s dependence on you, can be just the lever we need to force him to do what we want. But if you resign out and out like this, you present him with one reason less for doing the right thing. He has no incentive to rehire me if you tell him in so many words that you won’t come back in any case. When you’ve got a pistol to a man’s head, you don’t pull the trigger until you get what you can out of him.” The strain of speaking patiently such elementary truths was tiring him; his vocal cords ached as afte
r a long tutorial with one of those exasperating students who kept their own counsel and allowed you to explain and explain what they had already learned from the textbook. From Alma’s frowning brow, he could get no idea of whether he had already said enough or too much or too little to carry his message home. Her chin was sunk in her hand, and he had a suspicion that what he said depressed her in some way: did she think him venal, he wondered, for bringing the bald facts of barter to her attention? He suddenly felt the need of lifting the discussion to a higher plane. “I understand very well,” he continued, “your reaction of moral revulsion, but you’re behaving as though there were only yourself to consider. Once you go, Maynard’s conscience goes; you must face that, Alma. To have a firm character like yours is a responsibility, which you mustn’t and can’t run away from. So long as you can play the part of Maynard’s spiritual gadfly, you have the obligation to do so. I won’t speak of myself and Cathy—I know that you wouldn’t willingly harm us and have done what you did in our interest as it appeared to you—but beyond my own selfish concern, I can see something else: a weak man like Maynard in a position of power has the right to expect others stronger than himself to keep a watch on him and call him to task when he goes wrong. It’s a thankless job but you must keep it and not run away, like Jonah, into the belly of the whale.”

  He moistened his lips and sat back, confident that he had at last made an impression. Alma’s voice, when she spoke, was crestfallen; he supposed that the allusion to Cathy had cut her. “My strategy,” she said, “was different. I know Maynard Hoar very well, Hen, and my feminine instinct tells me that he responds only to the irrevocable, to a fait accompli. It’s a defect of imagination; you and I have too much; Maynard has too little. Tomorrow is never present to him until it becomes yesterday. My father was such a man. I left home for good when I was fifteen and went to work as a stack-girl in a library—my sisters reaped the benefits of his repentance. I’ve never seen him since.” The cords in her neck tightened with her emphasis; Henry regarded her thoughtfully; it was the first autobiographical word he had ever heard from her and her intensity carried a certain conviction.

  He remained, as yet, unpersuaded, but his mind had opened to new possibilities. Unconsciously, he took a new tone with her, as though he wished her to defeat him in argument. “Look, Alma,” he said, decisively. “You really have no right to do this. I can’t permit you to break your career on Cathy’s and my behalf. You think you’ll have no trouble getting another appointment, but let me tell you things aren’t what they were when you first came to Jocelyn. You’ll find conformity entrenched in every office, studying your dossier, asking questions, wondering ‘what was the background of your decision to leave Jocelyn.’ ” His voice suddenly tautened as he cited the well-remembered formula. “Guilt by association. The amalgam. The smear. I know it too well, Alma. You’ll be tarred by the same brush, I can promise you!” Tears sprang to his eyes as he relived his own experience, forgetting blindly, for the nonce, the purpose of what he was saying. “Naturally,” he concluded, dully, “I’m grateful to you for your warmheartedness, but there are things one cannot accept.”

  Despite himself, while he was speaking, a growing reverence for this woman began to mingle with his reprehension. Thought of detachedly, as a story, a tale to be told in the common rooms, her sacrifice had magnitude; it stirred him, like a legend heard in the distant future, on his own tongue. As he half-listened to her answer once again with the arguments she had just invoked, one part of his mind commenced to wonder how he could accept this sacrifice, having repudiated it so firmly, while another part still faintly protested at being sidetracked from its original object—how was it possible for her to have read Maynard and human nature better, as she kept averring, than he? “I learned long ago,” she stoutly reiterated, “that one can’t bargain in these affairs. If one wants to be effective, one hands in one’s resignation and clears out. There’s no other way for a man or an institution to learn that one is serious than to learn it too late.”

  His pale eyes watched her curiously: she had been laying out her class notes, solitaire-wise, in a series of stacks, and now, with an abrupt gesture, she scooped them all up together, like a deck of cards when the hand is finished. The neatness of the desk, the small, tense, wiry hands, the old-fashioned pen-holder and pen-wiper, the silver paper-cutter (a legacy, surely, of Mr. Fortune, who was said to have left her well fixed), the worn briefcase stood in the corner all suddenly struck him as manifestations of a disciplined life-force; he became aware of reserves of certainty in her before which his own convictions prepared to abdicate. Not since graduate school, he dreamily realized, had he experienced this uncanny sensation, like an animal’s, of the otherness of a separate being, with its own mysterious sources of propulsion; and that this epiphany should have been accorded him at this crisis in his affairs seemed to him instantly a Sign, which he obeyed with a sort of joy and altar-boy’s punctilio.

  “Very well,” he acceded, with a sigh.

  “In this instance,” his Diotima continued, “we must let Maynard know that he is living in the real world, that if he takes certain actions certain consequences will irreparably follow. If I make my resignation contingent on concessions from him, he will never be sure that I would have gone through with it, that he couldn’t have won me back in June or during the summer term. In fact, the whole tendency, Hen, of a conditional resignation would be to encourage Maynard to procrastinate, stave off any decision in the hope that I might exercise the proverbial woman’s privilege and change my mind. And, oh my dear, who knows? Perhaps I would,” she exclaimed on a more sprightly note. “We’re weak vessels, all of us, we thinking reeds. I hold it safer to burn my bridges.”

  She snapped a rubber band around her notes and stood up, with a shake of her skirt. “I have a class,” she apologized and rapped him with her knuckles sympathetically on the arm. “Don’t worry. One resignation will be enough to give Maynard an idea of how the wind blows. He’ll be taking in sail soon. Wait and see if he doesn’t. You have other friends, you know. Even poor Howie is having some second thoughts. He’s afraid that Domna will be next, and you know his little penchant there.”

  Henry made a sour face. “Domna will never resign,” he asserted, not knowing why he said this. Now that Alma was leaving him, he felt all at once abandoned, cheated, misused; he picked on Domna, partly to vent his mistrustfulness on a convenient target, and partly to detain Alma; yet the instant he had spoken he had a vicious certainty that he was right. “Domna is very young,” pensively observed Alma. “Moreover, she has a moral problem. We talked it over together last night.” Henry’s suspicions returned; he disliked the suggestion of “sharing” or “quiet time” that had come into Alma’s voice and felt like a carcass greedily picked between the two of them—what were their relations anyway? No wonder Domna had been too busy to telephone him with the news. “She isn’t altogether sure in her own mind,” said Alma thoughtfully, “whether she wants to stay at Jocelyn. If she’s going to resign in any case, she feels that it might be dishonest for her to let Maynard think, by resigning now, that she was doing it on your account. Or, conversely, if she resigns now, she feels that she might be under an obligation to stay if Maynard renews your contract.” Henry made a movement of impatience. “What infernal jesuitry!” he exclaimed. Alma shook her head at him, reproachfully. “No, my dear. You are quite wrong. Domna must know what she wants herself before she can rush into an action. There’s a side of her—she confessed it—that merely wants to emulate me. And another side, related to it, that would like to take credit for a principled action while suiting its own convenience. It was I, if you must know, Hen, who warned her against this possibility.”

  “I see,” said Henry, slowly, with a polite show of being convinced; in one part of his intelligence, he was, if not convinced, then impressed by this exercise of feminine scruples; he stored the lesson away in his memory against the future. “But Alma,” he interposed, as she made again t
o leave, “I don’t precisely follow how this argument can apply to Domna and not to you. If Domna must withdraw her resignation when Maynard renews my contract, why not you? It would seem to me that the same principle holds.” Alma’s eyes crinkled with laughter. “That’s a man for you,” she cried. “It’s not the same at all. Domna, you see, would sacrifice herself by staying. My sacrifice is to go. It’s very important,” she continued, soberly, tapping him with a forefinger, “to play for real stakes in these cases. You are worth something to us, my dear friend, and we must show that we mean it. No flimflam or mere attitudinizing. Until Domna decides in her own mind whether she would stay on at Jocelyn if this unfortunate thing hadn’t happened, she has no way of knowing whether it would cost her anything to resign. And she must not resign until she knows.” In the peremptory underscorings of that voice he heard the echo of many a formidable tutorial; Alma had what he had characterized as a sentimental severity that scared the girls stiff and left the boys stolid: many a soft lower lip had been sharply caught back and bitten, as Mrs. Fortune, leaning forward across her desk, eyes glistening and chin propped on her knuckles, lovingly impaled a moral weakness and squeezed it, like a pimple. “I see,” he repeated.