Mary McCarthy

by Mary McCarthy

  The Coes lived in a modern house that had been designed for them by a cousin of Jane’s. It stood on a bluff, overlooking the open ocean; the Coes now wished they had built in a hollow, the way the old settlers had, for the situation was very windswept, and nothing but dune grass and dusty miller and wild beach peas could get a footing in the whirling, shifting sand. In their early years, they had tried to keep a goat there; Jane had read that goat’s milk was terribly good for you and they were going to write to the Trappists for their receipt for cheese. But the goat was not happy; the reindeer moss, Jane concluded, was bad for it, and they had had to give the poor animal away, before she perished, to an eccentric old lady, one of the local characters, who was a zoophile and ran a sort of pound for all the discarded animals of the neighborhood, chiefly the half-wild cats the summer people abandoned. Yet the windy, barren, desolate setting had, it turned out, one unexpected advantage. Beaten by the storms, the house had weathered, so that it now seemed to belong to the landscape. The squat rectangular building, with futuristic hardware, painted gray originally and topped by a roped-off sundeck, now looked like an old-fashioned wooden icebox that had been wintering for generations on a New Leeds back porch. The Coes liked this effect and assigned credit to themselves for not having fought Nature. Everything fitted in, the worn tarpaulin covering the sundeck, the goat’s post—even the cylindrical bottled-gas tanks by the kitchen door, which looked so unsightly against a traditional house—harmonized with the main structure and with the sand heaped around it and the patches of reindeer moss and the gray sea birds circling above.

  Warren’s studio, into which he now showed the guests, stood fifty feet away from the main house. It had a two-story window with north light, which at present was obscured by three army blankets tacked up to keep out the cold. There were cushioned benches around the walls, lamps, a station-stove, and bookcases put together with bricks and planks. Warren was a very tidy man, and the corner in which he painted—pinning back the blankets—was impeccably neat; an oblong of floor around his easel had been swept with a hearthbroom he kept for the purpose. But the rest of the large room was a dusty, cobwebby jumble; he never heeded it unless they had company, but then he felt a quick embarrassment, seeing the shamble through their eyes: Jane’s mother’s piano, which they never used, blocking a side window; the pair of rusty English bicycles propped against the wall; the ping-pong table, covered with a stained sheet of canvas; the broken washing machine; the deep-freeze that had proved impractical because the electricity was so uncertain during the stormy season; the electric doughnut-maker and the combination waffle iron and sandwich grill, the roto-broiler, the mixmaster, the special pizza machine—all the gadgets sent Jane by her gadget-minded family perishing here as in a boneyard; the sun-faded draperies from the big living-room window; the badminton set. It was a comic spectacle, Warren ineluctably knew; Miles could hardly keep from guffawing, and he did not blame him. Smiling apologetically, he got out the whisk broom and began to brush off the cushioned benches so they could put the sneezing baby down; he used the feather duster on the piano. Removing his kerchief, flushing, he explained for the hundredth time that a modern house did not have much storage space. “Damn fool,” he said, vehemently, “pardon my French, I ought to have had the sense to build a two-story garage.” He knew the Murphys were thinking that it was Jane’s fault and he hated them for thinking it; at the same time, he mildly and politely desired to share their mirth. Miles was prowling about the room, studying the derelict objects with the air of a scientific connoisseur. “What, for God’s sake, is this, Warren?” he demanded, pointing to the infra-red broiler that Jane had got last Christmas, when they were trying a high-protein diet. Warren explained how it worked or, rather, he gamely joked, how it had worked. Jane was in the house, getting a tray of drinks, and it gave him a queer feeling to be jesting so boldly without her, almost like an escapade.

  “Why, it’s a regular cemetery of their hobbies,” Miles expatiated to Helen. Warren gently smiled. “That’s what John Sinnott told me,” he agreed. “He says I should do a painting, ‘The Artist in His Studio.’ Only he thinks I should call it, ‘The American Artist in His Studio.’ ” “Ah,” said Miles, nodding. All at once, his belly began to heave. “That’s good,” he cried, slapping his thigh. “Damn good!” He shook his handkerchief open and wiped the tears from his eyes. Dust flew. Warren waited courteously till the temblor of mirth had subsided. Thanks to Martha’s explanation, he was able to see what John and Miles saw: a satiric canvas, after Titian, in which he himself, the artist, a tiny dusty figure, was pushed into one corner, while his wife’s scientific gadgets and games and decorative fads monstrously took over the foreground. But to him, as he had tried to make clear to Martha, the objects in the room were not ridiculous, though he could see how in the aggregate they might appear so, to an outsider. To him, they evoked exciting memories, of midnight feasts shared with Jane, bicycle trips, skating on winter ponds, ping-pong rallies, doughnuts and cider; the piano made him think of Jane’s mother, and the deep-freeze recalled the hurricane two years ago when the electricity had been off three days and the road blocked, and they had lost nine gallons of assorted ice creams, which he and Jane had poured into buckets and taken on foot to the goat-lady. And it was not Jane’s fault that the appliances broke down; it was partly the climate—the sea air was bad for machines. She was not a good housekeeper, but, darn it, he admired her for that. All the women in her family had been fanatic housekeepers, and Jane had had the gumption to rebel. Martha had shrieked when Jane admitted that Warren had not had an ironed shirt in three years, but if he did not mind, why should Martha object? He would rather have Jane’s companionship than a stiff shirt any day. So he always said, and what was more he meant it. In his young days, he had been quite a dandy: he had carried a stick and yellow gloves and had his clothes made by a Turkish tailor. But those days were over. He had let Jane give his things away to a refugee without batting an eye. You could not dress like a stuffed shirt in New Leeds unless you were a dodo. It was John Sinnott, actually, that New Leeds chuckled over, when he came to parties in a dark business suit and white shirt. And Warren did not go to the city often enough any more to make it worth while to own a city suit. For those rare occasions, his gray corduroy, with a necktie, looked perfectly all right, especially if Jane touched up the shirt collar for him. In fact, as Jane told him, he looked much more the artist in that soft material.

  The only thing that gave him anxiety was the thought of his mother’s funeral—what would he wear? She was past seventy-five now, living in a boardinghouse in Savannah; her sister wrote that she was getting very frail. He was resigned to the prospect of her dying, except for that one thing—the suit to follow her to her grave in; he still had his bowler hat, which Jane had overlooked. This absurd worry preyed on his mind sometimes during the night, even though he assured himself that when the fatal telegram came, Jane would think of something. She was awfully resourceful.

  He knew some people thought he was dominated by Jane. Miles, for instance, this minute, was saying to him in a grave undertone: “If it was my wife, Warren, she’d clean this place up.” Miles, of course, thought only about his own comfort; he ate and drank like an Elizabethan, dressed in a florid style, with loud shirts and tweeds and silk socks, never considering for a minute that it was a human being who waited on him and catered to him and kept his things in order, laying out on a silent valet—Jane had seen it—everything he was going to wear, right down to the handkerchief and the necktie, while she had the baby and all the housework to think of. There was a sound at the door, and Warren hurried to open it. Wrapped in a shawl, Jane stood there with a tray of ice and bottles and glasses. “Let me help you, dear,” smiled Warren, taking the tray from her and urging her into the warm room. He noticed that she had forgotten the fizzy water and he skipped out to the house to get it, before she could realize and try to go instead. And he was glad to do a little service like that to help her, for he knew bl
amed well that she had a lot to put up with from him; he was a selfish cuss to live with, preoccupied with his painting, abstracted, not dry behind the ears yet, intellectually. For a girl who had grown up in a big family and who could have married anybody she wanted—or a darn sight better anyway—it was not a normal life.

  And when Jane had married him he had not been nearly the person he hoped he was now, thanks to her. It tickled him to think of his outgrown self—a conventional, safe little water colorist and pen-and-ink man, doing the usual stiles and cottages and dilapidated mansions and wrought-iron gates and Paris roofs and doorways; he had liked architectural themes and hoped to be a modern Piranesi or Callot. He had had to unlearn all that, bit by bit, like tearing your skin off piecemeal—some job for a man over forty. He could never have done it if Jane and her family had not stood by, financially and morally.

  He came back into the room quietly, carrying a pitcher of water; they seemed to be out of fizzy. “Oh, Warren,” exclaimed Jane, who was putting wood in the stove, “you didn’t need to do that. I brought water.” And sure enough, to his embarrassment, there was water in another pitcher on the tray. He felt like two cents. “We’re out of soda,” said Jane, with an awkward laugh. “I guess that’s what Warren went for.” “I’m sorry, dear,” said Warren. “I thought you’d forgotten it.” “I did,” confessed Jane. “I forgot to order it at the store. I always forget something.” “Never mind, never mind,” said Miles, with an air of testy magnanimity. Jane poured the drinks and Warren got ready to show the portrait.

  It was a big picture, like all his recent work—six by eleven. He hauled it out, unwrapped the outer canvas, fixed the lights, and then stood back to see what they would say. “Oh,” said Helen, after a moment. “Ah,” said Miles. “Do you see anything of Martha in it?” queried Warren, looking up at the portrait. He himself saw nothing but Martha, refracted all over the canvas. He had been trying something new, a dispersed, explosive cubism, in dark, smoky colors, in which the sitter’s personality-nucleus was blown apart into its component solids. There was a geyser of smoke in the middle representing the moment of fission; he was trying to get time, the fourth dimension, into his painting. “I think I see her nose,” Miles said finally, when he had backed up against the farther wall.

  Three

  MILES was nonplussed by the portrait. It reminded him a little of science fiction and a little of old-fashioned movie music and, most of all, of Jesuit sermons on Hell. It conveyed fury and conflict. It was, he supposed, what you might call program painting. “It represents fission,” said Warren. “I’m using that as the theme for this whole series of portraits.” Miles made an impatient gesture. Warren had explained the theory behind his painting before; he was trying to express the fourth dimension or the general theory of relativity or something of the kind—Jane’s father, a scientist, had put him up to it. This sort of talk did not interest Miles. Theory, in artists, did not matter to him, only results. “By their fruits, ye shall know them,” he always said, sententiously. He had first known Warren in his so-called quantum phase, which was succeeded by his galactic phase: Warren seemed to think that progress was mandatory in art and bubbled about advances and setbacks—he had lost three years, he had once confided, when he let Picasso lead him up the garden walk. Most artists talked that way nowadays—perhaps they had always done so; and most of them had a father-figure in the background who supplied the motor-ideas. They were all boy scouts in their corduroy fashion, eager beavers, following the leader, some jackleg critic or straw-boss philosopher.

  But the work was something else again. Whatever nonsense he spouted, Warren was an able draftsman. He had got the hair just right—a fair skein of silk streaming across the canvas. In Miles’s desk drawer, at home, among the keepsakes of his previous marriages—a pair of tiny gloves, a ribboned garter, an old packet of fish-skins—there was a tress of Martha’s hair, now dulled, that had once shone and rippled like the hair in Warren’s picture. And Warren had caught something of Martha’s temperament in the blunt tilt of the nose and the tiny, staring eyehole of the nostril. “Why, it’s the best thing you’ve done,” Miles suddenly decided. The other three looked at him, wonderingly. Miles read Helen’s questioning gaze. “Isn’t it rather dark?” she murmured. She meant academic. There were two opinions in New Leeds on the subject of Warren’s painting—the one that called it too modern and the one that called it academic. Among the summer crowd, Warren’s quest for the fourth dimension was considered rather a joke, a sad joke, because he was a nice man. There was a lot of irony in the position, Miles had often reflected. If Warren had been a carpenter or a plumber, he could have made his marks as a naif painter with a scientific “vision,” but his art-school training rendered him funny ha-ha to the cognoscenti, among whom Miles did not number himself. In the days when the poor devil used to have exhibitions in the rug-and-craft shop on the village green, everybody turned up, out of friendship for the Coes, and quietly snickered into their sleeve at the sign hand-lettered by Warren—“Prices on Request.” He had never sold a canvas in all his years up here, which, Martha used to claim, was a sort of achievement, considering the local taste. He could not even give one away: people protested that they were too big or too dark for a seashore house.

  Miles began to pace up and down. His present wife’s attitude annoyed him—she was too conventional in her responses. He stopped by the liquor tray and poured himself a fresh drink. He was thinking of Martha. He had always had a weakness for intelligent women, though he knew them to be bad for him, like drink or certain kinds of food. They disagreed with him, in both senses of the word. Now that he was older, he knew enough to leave them alone. He had organized his life sensibly, and the proof was that he was writing again, after fifteen years. But he had bouts of dissatisfaction, when he resented the choice that had been made for him. That was how he felt about it on his glum days, as if an authority had chosen for him, though the authority had been no other than Miles Murphy: he had prescribed for himself, as his own therapist, studying his character structure and deducing from it the qualities he required in a mate. He had given a woman friend his specifications—a girl approaching middle life but not too old for childbearing, not previously married, unencumbered by family, possessing an independent income and an open mind, with a sense of her own dignity, submissive, pleasant-spoken, and moderately pleasing to the eye. And his friend had produced Helen the first crack out of the box.

  Helen was all woman, and he was damn lucky to have got her. They did not make them like her any more. Her father was a Greek wholesaler in Chicago, with a big import trade; Helen had stayed home to nurse her mother when the old man died and the older brother married. She had helped run the family business for a time, done her bit for war relief, and studied ceramics at the Art Institute. The family was cultivated; she had an uncle who was a Metropolitan. When the old lady passed on, finally, she was practically alone in the world, except for a raft of suitors—Penelope waiting for Odysseus. And she had had the patience to hold out till crafty old Odysseus came. She was not stupid, though stupid people thought so, but she had learned how to efface herself, in the European way. For the first time in his life (his mother had never favored him), he discovered that he came first. She could take his abrupt dictation and decipher his manuscript notes and hold the dinner till midnight if he did not feel like eating. She could keep the child quiet in the morning when he had been sleeping a binge off. When they read Aeschylus together in the evenings, as they were doing this fall, she looked up the hard words in the dictionary and put them down on a list for him. She kept the household accounts and never bothered him about money. If he felt like talking, she listened and asked intelligent questions. If he was nervous and morose, she left him alone. She never turned on the waterworks, like Martha; a little bird must have told her that he could not stand women’s tears.

  She did not stimulate him—that was her only drawback. He did not notice this, he found, unless he had been drinking. Then, in a
disgruntled frame of mind, after he had sent her off to bed, he would open the desk drawer, stare at Martha’s little gloves, and set himself to recalling her clever remarks. Martha always hated this habit of his—the desk drawer, she said, and everything it contained of him. She hated his remembering things she said. “You turn everything into the past,” she would tell him sharply. And she also used to complain that he remembered her worst mots, accidentally-on-purpose. “That isn’t funny,” she used to say coldly, when he was chuckling over one of her satirical strokes. “Please, Miles, don’t quote me.” It was all part of her general pattern of rejection and self-hatred. She could not stand to hear anything said twice. One habitual phrase of his used to drive her crazy: “I’m inordinately fond of pickles,” “I’m inordinately fond of potatoes.” “You’re inordinately fond of saying that!” she had cried out once. “I know you like potatoes. Don’t dwell on it.” Today, whenever he used the expression, it tickled him to think of Martha.

  She was awfully good on people. He had to hand it to her, even when he was the target. And every time he saw the Coes, nowadays, he remembered the night when everybody was saying that Warren was too intellectual in his approach to painting and Martha had retorted that he was just as intellectual as Barrett, who kept asking “Why?” all day long. That had hit Warren off to a T, though Miles had not appreciated it at the time. He was not as noticing as Martha; she was very feminine that way. He used to tell people, confidently, that Warren had a genuine epistemological bent. He groaned, now, to think of what he had started when he had put him onto Whitehead and Russell and Sullivan.

  This, he felt awesomely sure, was a deed he would have to answer for on Judgment Day. He had not dreamed, when he first undertook to supervise Warren’s reading, that Warren was utterly innocent of the nature of an abstract concept: he took everything he read with a happy literalness and supposed that modern science had fixed it so that two and two equaled five. He had pounced on that notion in Dostoevski, and came bearing it to Miles like a retriever, a few years back. “Haven’t the scientists proved that?” he had asked, with startled eyes, when Miles tried to unscramble him. The poor fellow could not get the idea of proof out of his noodle. Science and philosophy had deranged his common sense. “How do you know that?” he kept challenging when you let drop the most casual observation. And since he could not understand the only two fields in which proof was possible—logic and mathematics—he had fallen back, despondently, on the notion that everything was false. He had even, for a time, lost faith in his painting. His work, he had discovered, was a lie, just as big a lie, he said bitterly, as Rembrandt or Titian, who at least thought the world they were painting was real. The fact that you could never see time—the fourth dimension—had hit him amidships halfway through a volume of Kierkegaard; he realized he was a faker and illusionist and probably ought to be put in jail. This revelation had made him sick; Jane vouched for it. He lay in their outsize bed, shivering, under the electric blanket, for nearly three weeks, baffling the doctor and the Freudian analyst, who was piped in daily from New York.