Mary McCarthy

by Mary McCarthy

  The baby, at present, was lying on a blanket, sucking a chicken wing. Helen Murphy had carried him down the beach on her back, in a sort of fishnet bag that Miles had designed for her. Miles did not believe in sitters, and they had never been able to keep a servant—not for lack of money, for Helen had plenty, but because of Miles’s tempers and drinking habits. Warren sat looking at the baby; he loved children and he and Jane were childless. The two women were talking in low voices; Miles had sunk into abstraction. Warren undid the white handkerchief he wore around his head, like a housemaid’s dust cap, to protect his brain from the sun. He leaned over to the baby and, smiling, began to wiggle his ears. He knew Miles was watching him, sardonically, from narrowed, slightly bloodshot eyes, but in such matters as these Warren was a fearless traditionalist. The baby, to his joy, smiled back. At this moment, Jane chose to mention the Sinnotts. Warren’s heart sank; he slumped into the sand. He felt, as he said later, about as big as a minute. Jane’s curiosity, brimming out of her big round eyes, gave the show away. He was cross as the dickens. He and Jane had compacted not to mention Martha unless Miles or Helen did it first, but when it came to gossip Jane was weak and disloyal, like a bad little girl. She was now looking rather shamefaced, her eyes cast down and a tentative grin twitching her wide red mouth; later she would say that Miles would surely have thought it funny if she had not mentioned Martha.

  Miles sat up, chewing on a spear of beach grass. “How are they getting along?” he inquired, with evident interest. Warren felt terrifically relieved to find that he had been wrong, as usual. There was a slight pause; the Coes eyed each other. “You haven’t seen her?” said Jane, looking at Miles curiously. Miles shook his head. “I’ve never seen her,” mused Helen. “Of course, I feel I know her from what Miles has said.” She said this in a simple, deferential tone that made a great impression on Warren. This tall placid brunette girl simply worshipped Miles, which was what Miles had always needed. Everything about him, apparently, was sacred to her, including his ex-wives; she sounded almost as if Martha were a holy relic of Miles’s past, like his first baby shoes. Warren was amazed; he felt he was getting to know Helen finally. “That’s funny,” he said, sliding over to her, brightly, with his winning smile. “That you haven’t seen her, I mean. You’d think you would have run into each other at the Stop and Shop or the Arena Theater or meeting the train or something. It’s almost like a reverse coincidence. Mathematically—wouldn’t you say, Miles?—the chances would be all the other way. I mean if Helen and Martha missed each other umpteen times . . . ?” His high thin voice halted as he saw that Miles was not interested in a statistical discussion.

  “She’s changed,” said Jane, thoughtfully. “How, Jane?” said Helen, with her warm, interested smile. Despite the fact that she and Miles had been married two years now, she still had a slight, hovering air of ingratiation, as if she were Miles’s secretary; she had a long, straight figure and buxom legs, which she wound around each other unobtrusively; she carried her cropped head a little to one side, and kept her lips slightly parted. “Well,” said Jane. “More hectic for one thing. Wouldn’t you say so, Warren? They laugh a lot at parties. They’re both quite witty, you know, and that rather scares people in New Leeds.” Miles nodded, with an air of acumen; he had a funny way of listening, not to the things you said, but to something behind them; you could feel him click like an adding machine when a congenial thought was deposited. “She isn’t nearly as popular as she used to be,” continued Jane, candidly, avoiding Warren’s eye. “People say they’re too critical.” “Ah,” said Miles. There was a silence. “They seem very much in love,” volunteered Jane, slowly. “Seem!” reproachfully cried Warren. “You oughtn’t to say that, Jane. Of course, they’re in love. If they aren’t, who is?” Jane giggled. “Warren is awfully loyal,” she said to Miles. “Why, that makes me hot under the collar,” protested Warren, sitting up and moving his bare thin neck, as if a real collar were confining it. “I’m not loyal. I’m just going by what I see. How would you feel, Jane, if somebody said, ‘The Coes seem very much in love’? Why, I’d fight the person that said that. Don’t you agree with me, Miles? Why, that was an awful remark, darling.” “They seem to be in love—that’s all I said,” returned Jane, with composure. “Well, they are,” said Warren, fiercely subsiding. He retied the handkerchief carefully round his head. The Murphys laughed.

  “After all, Warren,” suggested Jane. “There was that story. Last week.” Warren’s bright face sobered; the spots of color paled; he nodded glumly. The Murphys were all ears. “Should I tell it, Warren?” asked Jane. “Might as well,” he answered, folding his arms, with a gloomy, stoical mien and bowing his kerchiefed head. “Excuse me, dear,” he added. “Well,” said Jane, “the story is they’ve been fighting. They came to the doctor all cut up and smelling of alcohol. They claimed they fell through a window.” “All cut up, Jane?” gently inquired Helen. “Well,” said Jane. “I haven’t actually seen them.” “I have,” said Warren. “I met them this morning. I forgot to tell you, Jane. It was just their hands.” “But isn’t that peculiar?” said Helen. “Peculiar is right,” said Warren emphatically; he hated to have his close friends involve themselves in a scandal, even if it was just from thoughtlessness—it spoiled his image of them. “Mind you,” he added, pointing his finger suddenly at Miles, “I don’t think this proves they’ve been fighting. But I can’t see how they both broke a window unless they were spifflicated.” “That’s the strange part,” continued Jane. “That’s why everybody’s discussing it. They hardly drink at all. Much less than they used to. At least, when they’re out in public. Probably they’ve become secret drinkers.” She waggled her jaw. “They say that’s very common with romantic couples like that. They move to the country and pull the shades and start drinking and the next thing you know there’s a suicide pact.” “Have you ever heard of that, Miles?” demanded Warren, his eager falsetto breaking in on Jane’s deep, comfortable tones. “Martha says it’s quite frequent.”

  “Martha says?” exclaimed Miles. His large frame jerked upward and sideward, as if somebody had stuck him in the ribs. “You mean she talks about it?” “Not about herself,” qualified Jane. “About other people. There was a case in the papers the other day, people we used to know, and that’s how she explained it.” “Very interesting,” said Miles, nudging Helen’s behind with his perforated shoe. “How do you mean?” said Jane. Miles stroked his chin. “Martha is a very sick girl,” he said. The Coes glanced at each other, surreptitiously. “I’ll give you two examples,” said Miles, after a pause. “You remember the fire we had?” The Coes nodded. “Well, she talked about the fire incessantly before it happened. She was convinced the house was going to burn down because of some private guilt of her own. And then, by God, it did.” “You don’t mean you think she started it?” cried Jane. Miles shrugged. “I’ve been studying some poltergeist cases recently and I recognized the pattern. I don’t know how I missed it before. She was the first one up that night and normally she sleeps like a log. She’d rescued the boy before I knew what was what. The boy was asleep too. Nobody smelled smoke but Martha, and she got herself and the boy completely dressed before she called the fire department.” “Good Lord,” said Jane. “Yes,” said Miles. “Notice—she didn’t want to hurt anybody. That’s typical of these cases. It’s an attention-drawing mechanism, primarily.” “She felt overshadowed by Miles,” elucidated Helen. “But she was quite beside herself,” said Miles, “when the insurance people came down to investigate. Wanted to put the blame on some poor devil of a workman who’d done the wiring. Never gave a thought to the fact that he’d be prosecuted if the insurance people believed her. She said it was her fault, really, that she’d instructed him to commit a violation—all poppycock. It was her neurotic way of confessing the truth, of saying, in symbolic language, that the fire was her fault; she was the firebug. And you know, by God, I remembered something she told me once—that when she was a little girl she used to put her
younger brother up to setting fires; he’d get the blame and she’d watch the blaze. The brother never knew it; she was clever, the way she instigated him; he thought all through his boyhood that he was the pyromaniac.”

  “Whew!” said Warren, running his hand across his brow. He glanced at Jane wonderingly: did she credit this story? He would have liked to argue one or two points in it with Miles, but he hated to let Helen think he disbelieved her husband. His heart, as he told Jane, sank to his boots. The blue day was blackened for him; he knew he would not sleep for thinking of this tale. Either way he looked at it, it was horrible, horrible for Martha, if true, horrible for Miles, if false. And horrible for him and Jane to be listening to it, crouched around Miles on a lovely fall afternoon. “Understand,” said Miles. “I don’t hold it against her. All that’s in the past. I think now I mishandled her. I didn’t allow for the fact that she was a very frightened kid when I married her. Helen thinks so too.” His wife bobbed her head in quick, sympathetic agreement. “I thought,” said Miles, “I could teach her self-knowledge. But when she found out I was on to her, she flew the coop.” He laughed. Warren felt deeply shocked. “And she took her revenge. I don’t blame her. She has the modern girl’s vindictive mania for publicity. She could have left me any time in broad daylight, without any fanfare. But she had to do it in a nightgown, at three o’clock in the morning.” Warren caught his breath; this was not the way Miles had told the story before.

  Warren and Jane too—he could tell from the look in her eyes—remembered perfectly well the morning Miles had come out to their house in a taxi, his red beard unshaven, fumes of liquor still on his breath, looking for Martha and crying. According to the story he told then he had locked Martha out of the house in her nightgown, in a fit of drunken humor, and gone up to bed fully expecting her to come back in the kitchen door, which was open—that sort of thing was always happening in New Leeds, he had insisted, and the wives did not take it seriously. Martha’s story, which Jane and Warren had always believed, was that Miles had waked her up, kicked her out of bed, and pushed her step by step down the stairs and out the front door and ordered her not to come back—John Sinnott had seen the bruises, and the little boy, Barrett, according to the cleaning woman, had been watching over the banister.

  “It was another put-up job,” said Miles, cool as a cucumber. “I was little brother this time. She got the idea it would be nice for me to lock her out, and she set me on to do it. She woke me up from a sound sleep and told me she was in love with Sinnott and dared me to put her out of the house. I was the patsy.”

  “I can understand,” finally said Jane, after a very long silence, “that she provoked you, Miles. But did she actually tell you, in so many words, to lock her out of the house? It doesn’t sound like Martha.” Warren nodded eagerly. “No question about it,” said Miles. “It was the case of her brother all over again, don’t you see?” explained Helen. “She put the idea in Miles’s head.” Warren sighed. He thought Miles was lying, and this depressed him terribly; it meant Miles was a person he could no longer talk to honestly. At the same time, he pitied Miles; he supposed Miles half-believed the things he was saying, though even a rather dumb soul, like himself, could see plumb through them and realize that all that about having forgiven Martha was a lot of hooey. Warren could not imagine that if he and Jane should ever separate—even if it were Jane’s fault—he would ever say such awful things about her.

  And he guessed that was a limitation, in a way; he lacked the bravado to tell such a big lie. He was old-fashioned. He had liberated himself in his painting, and he and Jane had engaged in some pretty daring experiments in bed, but socially he was no pioneer. Probably, at bottom, he was as big a scoundrel as Miles; in his heart, perhaps he really wanted to beat up women and brag and lie and was just the prisoner of his inhibitions. The psychoanalyst had shown him, five summers ago, that he was full of unreleased aggressions; the cramp he had developed in his right hand cleared up like magic when the analyst proved to him that it was not a painting block but plain muscular tension; the Coes had been having a little boundary dispute with their neighbor, and what Warren really wanted, underneath, it turned out, was to punch the fellow in the jaw. The analyst had opened his eyes to a lot of things; all moral values, to the analyst, were just rationalizations: ego massage. Warren’s own values came from an identification with his mother and from being the class underdog in a sadistic military school, where they used to tear up his water colors and make him do dirty drawings. Any values he had learned that way were probably subjective and specious; no doubt he was just a bottled-up bully who overcompensated in the other direction. And yet you had to live with your values, Warren stuck to that, though he had been awfully interested to get the analyst’s point of view. Your rationalizations, darn it, were part of you too. Even if he knew he was a pharisee, he still leapt up when a woman came into the room. And it still made his blood boil to hear Miles spin a theory at Martha’s expense, though of course he was just as much of a hypocrite himself to sit there and smile when he wanted to kill the guy. Probably a worse hypocrite, as Jane would be able to tell him, when they talked it over together: the reason he was so hopping mad was probably a selfish one. He did not want to admit that Martha could be dishonest because he needed her honesty: she was the only person in New Leeds, outside of Jane, who understood what he was doing in his painting.

  “Warren did her portrait last month,” Jane was saying. “Oh, I should love to see it,” murmured Helen. “Shall we go and look at it, Miles?” Miles made a sound of consent and heaved himself up from the sand. “Is she still so lovely?” Helen asked, arranging the baby in the bag. Warren watched her wanly, almost forgetting to help. She was bound to be disappointed in the portrait—people always were. They looked at his paintings and said, “Oh,” in a surprised tone; when he explained the theory behind them, they listened but kept glancing uneasily back at the canvases, as if they could not find the connection. For a moment he suspected Helen of insincerity: did she really want to see the painting or was she only interested in getting Miles moving? The afternoon wind had risen and the little cove was full of wavelets. Miles, warmly dressed in wool muffler, wool shirt, and tweed jacket, might never give a thought to the fact that the baby could take cold. If it had been Martha, Warren reflected, she would have told him they had to leave on account of the baby and Miles would have said, “Nonsense,” and they would have had a fight. But Helen, the Coes agreed, was a better manager; she tried to lead Miles without his knowing it, but she never argued, they noticed. If he said, “Nonsense,” she said, “Yes, dear,” as if she honestly welcomed the correction, even when Miles was in the wrong. Warren sometimes wondered whether this was altogether good for Miles; he would hate it, himself, if Jane tried it.

  Still, he admired Helen for her selfless devotion, and he undertook to answer her question seriously, as they walked along the beach, back to the house. Helen had the baby; he had the knapsack with the lunch things. Miles and Jane brought up the rear, walking slowly: Jane was looking for driftwood. “Jane could tell you better,” he said. “I look at her as a painter. She has a lot of animation in her face. An academic painter, with late baroque light effects, could make her very arresting. That’s the way I would have done her in my early phase: a smoldering little saint with fair hair and white skin and black eyes. Some people might call that beauty. But when you study her you see that her face is asymmetrical. One profile’s classic; the other’s irregular. The eye is narrower and longer; the nose has a little bump; the mouth twists. Personally, I find that profile a lot more interesting. You can see her medical history in it, for instance. She must have had adenoids as a kid and she’s astigmatic and she learned to eat on one side of her mouth when she had a tooth out in her early twenties. The layman doesn’t notice these things.” He stooped to pick up a sand dollar, examined it, and put it in the pocket of his canvas trousers. “In the old days,” he continued, with a sideways glance at Helen, “they used to think they c
ould tell a witch if the profiles didn’t match. Jane would have been burned. That’s what got me started noticing. One side of Jane’s face is reflective; she even has a tiny cast in that eye, and there’s a funny droop to the mouth. The other is active and practical. It’s awfully interesting stuff when you get onto it. Women, I find, are more two-faced than men, which is what the human race has always thought anyway.” Helen smiled vaguely. Her own parts were rather curiously assembled—small, round head, small ears, large legs, large, full long neck—though she was a pleasant-looking woman, taken as a whole. “John Sinnott,” added Warren, “has the most regular features I’ve ever seen. His profiles exactly match, which is frightfully rare. And the features are small too, cameo-cut, though he’s a tall man. It’s a French Renaissance face. Probably Norman blood.” “You’re interested in ancestry?” said Helen. “Oh, terrifically,” said Warren. “I suppose it’s the southern side of me. Ever since I started these new portraits, I’ve been studying anthropological types. Jane took her major in anthropology. We’ve been looking up some of the old books on phrenology too—wonderful stuff.” He sighed. “Those old boys knew a lot that we moderns have forgotten. Have you ever gone into phrenology?” Helen shook her head. “Try it some time,” advised Warren, over his shoulder, as he began to scale the sand cliff, holding out his left hand for Helen after he had got a foothold. “Of course, I know you’re busy,” he added apologetically, pulling her upward, “with the baby and the house. But I’d love to know what you and Miles thought of it. I have some heads and charts in the studio; I’ll show you, if you’d like.” And he hurried ahead, bending back the briars to make way for Helen and the baby.