Mary McCarthy

by Mary McCarthy

  She heard the car door slam, down the hill by the garage, and ransacked her mind for something to tell John that would divert him from the subject of the portrait—something amusing or very serious. But as she watched him, coming up the hill, with a determined, purposeful step, there were only words running through her head: value, posterity, truth.

  Five

  IT WAS Martha’s theory that people, whatever they said, did in the end what they wanted. The only exception she knew of was her relation with Miles. With Miles she had done steadily what she hated, starting from the moment she married him, violently against her will. “You wanted to, all right,” he used to growl at her, but she knew that it was not true. She had no explanation for this strange fact about herself. She was timid but not supine; nobody, except Miles, had ever browbeat her successfully. It was her youth, her friends had told her; when she met him, she had been an untried girl, who had not found herself, as the phrase was. If that was the case (and even John seemed to think so), she should have outgrown her fear of Miles during the intervening years; she felt much stronger, certainly. Yet, to her horror, the other day at the Coes’, when she was face to face with Miles, the years between vanished and she had begun to tremble again, as she had not trembled since the night she had left him. This awful weakness in herself she dared not confess to John, chiefly for fear of troubling him with something that was inexplicable. She did not like Miles, but she did not dislike him either, apart from his effect on her. Now that she was free of him, she saw his good points and his drawbacks in her customary clear perspective. Here in the New Leeds region, he had a certain stature, compared to the other men; he had a canny mind and read a great deal, seriously. He might yet produce something worth while in the new field he had roamed into—the history of ideas; he was forceful and energetic, with a gift for amassing information that was like his prodigies at the table. . . . His trouble, Martha had decided, was that his talent was crushed by his ambition; he had wanted to be another Goethe and had ended up as a rolling stone. And he had no facility of expression. She herself, she now perceived, had qualities Miles envied: a sharp ear and a lively natural style. There was therefore no reason why she should tremble before him, when she knew him, moreover, to be selfish, brutal, and dishonest in his domestic life.

  Her weakness in his presence must, she supposed, be explained by that mysterious entity known as power. But this did not take her much further, because she did not understand power, either the desire for it or the yielding to it. She could not imagine, except when she was near Miles, obedience that was not based either on rational consent or on rational fear. But she had obeyed Miles, when she was married to him, without knowing why.

  This irrational element, this bewilderment before her own actions, had been present from the very beginning; she had ceased to know herself from the moment she met Miles. She was just out of college then, where she had been voted “most literary” as well as “best actress.” Her teachers said “Martha can do anything.” She herself was not sure yet whether she really wanted to try to be an actress, which was what her class book predicted, or to write poetry, her earliest interest, or to plug ahead and do graduate work, which was what her favorite teacher advised. Her father was sending her an allowance so that she could take her time. She was engaged to a young man who had two more years, still, of architectural school; she had just had a rather squalid abortion, which another young man had paid for; she was acting small parts in a shoestring summer theater—when Miles, a friend of the producer, drifted in one terrible evening, after a bad performance, and started bulldozing her into marriage before she really knew him. It was what she needed, he assured her, appraising her with his jellied green eyes when she woke up, for the second time, in bed with him, after a lot of drinks. And because she had found herself in bed with him, against her natural inclinations (for he seemed immensely old to her, being well over forty while she was not yet twenty-one), she had concluded that he must be right. He knew what was best for her, doubtless—she needed a steadying force, a man, as he said, with a mind. She went back to the theater dormitory and sat on her bed, stoically, like a lump. She did not understand what had happened. She had only, she bemoaned, wanted to talk to him—a well-known playwright and editor, successful, positive, interested in her ideas and life-history. And yet he must be right; even her teachers would think so. She would never, surely, have yielded to his embraces, shrinking, as she did, from his swollen belly and big, crooked nose, if some deep urge in herself, which he seemed to understand, had not decreed it. The fatalistic side of her character accepted Miles as a punishment for the sin of having slept with him when she did not love him, when she loved, she still felt, someone else. Nevertheless, she had naively sought a compromise. She had begged Miles merely to live with him, as his mistress. But Miles had held out for marriage, instanter; he needed a mother for his son. She was still hesitating when the knot was tied and Miles was sitting beside her on the train, his chin sunk on his chest, morosely silent, a stranger, as they journeyed to pick up the boy, who was living with Miles’s sister. He would not let her telegraph her presumptive fiancé, in Cambridge, until the ceremony was over.

  That was Miles. He would not let her give notice to the theater people, either, but made her pack her bags while she was still rehearsing next week’s part. The rest of her marriage, which had lasted four years, was in a way simply a catalogue of the natural things Miles would not let her do. He would not let her fly to Juneau to her father’s funeral, though her mother was ill and wired her the money. He would not let her see her brother off to the war or have him in the house when he came back wounded. He made her change her hair and turn over her small capital to him, after her mother died; he would never give her an allowance for the household or herself. He held the checkbook and hired and fired the servants, when they had them. He would not let her go to New York, once they had moved to New Leeds, unless he accompanied her. She could not get the child vaccinated or inoculated against diphtheria because Miles objected. He refused to have her practice birth-control and when she did it, privily, he made terrible scenes at night. He would not let her see her friends or accept an invitation without consulting him first. And, finally, he would not let her leave him.

  There it was again. She was afraid to leave him, though he had no means of preventing her from doing it at any moment, had she dared. But, improbable as it seemed now, she had felt she could not leave him without his permission. When she finally ran away, it was partly because of John, whom she had secretly fallen in love with, but mainly because Miles, by pushing her out of the house, had seemed at last to give her license. That was why she flew out to the garage, in her nightgown, before he could revoke it. And even at that moment, as she turned on the ignition, she had the uneasy sense that she was taking advantage of Miles: he had not really meant for her to go.

  This unaccountable fear she had often discussed with John. It was exactly, she said, like a phobia, like the fear of dogs or snakes or high places; reason had nothing to do with it. To tell herself that Miles could not hurt her had no more effect than pointing out that a snake was harmless or a dog did not bite. She knew he could not hurt her, seriously, and she used to force herself to oppose him, on small points, like an acrophobe who makes himself look over a parapet. But it did not work. The more she nerved herself to differ with him, the more fear she felt. It was only a sort of social shame or conscience on Barrett’s behalf that drove her to take stands. She resisted him because she thought she ought to, in a flurry of hysterical defiance. And the mere act of controverting him made her lose her head. She would find herself arguing excitedly when she knew she was in the wrong, or the issue would get away from her and turn into something else. Their penultimate quarrel, for example, had exploded in the middle of the night, after a party, when she was carrying out two overflowing pails of garbage and he refused, with a sardonic bow, to hold open the screen door for her. There she was, manifestly, the injured party, but instead of leaving
it at that and taxing him with it the next day, when he was weakened with a hangover, she immediately distributed the guilt by setting down one pail of garbage and slapping him across his grinning face. She never knew how to make him feel sorry for what he had done.

  The first night of their marriage, when he had suddenly struck her, for no reason, as she was climbing into bed, she had looked up at him in mute amazement, too startled even to cry. So far as she knew herself, Martha was one of those people who were naturally reasonable, like an open-minded child who listens unsuspiciously to what is told him and expects no evil. And Miles, from the outset, with a sort of blind purpose, like a mole, had set himself to undermine her sense of credibility: she could not believe what was happening. If she were a real woman, Miles used to tell her, she would learn how to handle him. But something obstinate in her nature refused to be indoctrinated; her passion for the normal rebelled. She would not exploit his “good” moods, and fear and nervous excitement caused her to fumble their quarrels. The sound of his tread, coming up the stairs, at night, when he had been drinking, made her heart race with terror, even when she had the door locked against him. In fact—here again was an oddity—she was more frightened on the nights when she had had the courage to turn her doorkey, softly, while he was still downstairs, than when she had left the door unlocked. It was her own guilty temerity, in the face of him, that held her palpitating, waiting for the knob to turn, the heavy knock to sound, rattling the whole house, and the step, finally, to lurch away into the guest bedroom.

  It still made her shiver to think of those nights. She had not been able to get to sleep, even after he was gone and she could hear his snores, like regular paroxysms, coming from down the corridor. Fear would be succeeded by remorse, another form of cowardice; she always flinched from offending anyone, as if from a blow at herself. She could not bear the picture of humiliation, even in an enemy, even in Miles. The thought of the maid and Barrett listening in their beds, while Miles pounded uncertainly at the door, a suppliant, made her relent, as often as not, and tiptoe across the room to let him in. It was better, on the whole, to be kicked out of bed and to retreat herself to the guest bedroom than to listen to his exiled snores and be sorry.

  A psychiatrist, of course, would say that she had wanted Miles to beat her. Miles himself used to contend this, in his seignorial style; he convinced himself that he was doing her a service by letting her have a black eye. It was on the strength of such “insights,” she supposed, that he had begun to take paying patients after she had left him. But even discounting Miles’s opinion, Martha herself had often wondered whether there could be a grain of truth in the charge. Yet if there was anything she knew about herself, it was that she hated violence. She had never received it from John and never, as she assured him wryly, missed it. He objected because she screamed, sometimes, when he came upon her unexpectedly, and her hand sometimes flew up to her face, as if to ward off a blow, when he raised his arm casually, in the midst of a discussion. But she was hoping to get over these reflexes, the last trace of Miles’s influence, as she had got over her bad dreams and the other fears, of automobiles, of falling, that he had left in his wake. With John, she was a different person, and she was proud of it. She had even been looking forward, secretly, to meeting Miles again, to confront him with her new character.

  The strange thing was that nobody seemed to have noticed her trembling the other day at the Coes’, though the pounding of her heart, when Miles came to take her cloak, had been so loud that she thought the whole room must hear it, like a rumbling in somebody’s stomach. She had not seen the Coes since, but John and Dolly Lamb had assured her that she was fine when she asked them, “How did I seem?” in an apprehensive voice. And John, when she reiterated the question, adding, “Tell me the truth,” appeared a little surprised. “You were fine,” he said again, absently: his only criticism was that she had been too natural and friendly. This alarmed Martha. Either, she reasoned, he was withholding his real view, from tact, or else, she possessed, unknown to herself, the power to deceive him. And the last thing she wanted was to have such a power.

  She had always been able to deceive Miles because he did not know her. He had mistaken both her faults and her virtues. He did not reckon with idealism as a serious factor in life and judged, as he used to say weightily, by actions. He had supposed that she must love him because she had let him seduce her on the very first meeting and because she did not leave him though she continually threatened to do so. This refusal to listen was a form of stupidity that Martha especially abhorred, and she considered Miles well punished for it. If he had ever taken seriously her passionate desire to leave him, she might not (she now believed) have been driven to show him in practice how little indeed he knew. To pay attention, for Martha, was the prime human virtue; without it, there could be no dignity and no reciprocity. The alertness of this faculty was what she prized in John. She wished nothing to be hidden from him, not even the bad parts of her nature. She respected his privacy, because he was a man, but for herself, if she could not be transparent, she did not want to love.

  It seemed to her, therefore, ominous that the minute Miles re-entered her life, a slight deception began, almost automatically. She was able to conceal again, like that other person, whom she was supposed to have outgrown. She was both glad and sorry that John had not observed the turmoil she had been thrown into. It cut her off from him; he no longer knew her, which was perhaps for the best, since she did not know herself. Looking at Miles, she felt the old central question turned on her like an artillery piece. In the twelve years since she had met him, he had not changed at all. She could explain, in a way, how she had come to marry him, under the circumstances, and how, under the circumstances, she had stayed with him so long. But why she had let this man make love to her in the first place remained totally mystifying. Just at this point, when she looked at him and then looked backward, there was a terrifying blank.

  “Yes, why did you?” said Dolly Lamb, gently, with a quizzical look at Martha, who had driven over to see her the day after the vicomte’s visit. She was used to Martha’s irruptions into her orderly life and had come up here, only the Saturday before last, to paint the marshes, because John and Martha had written to tell her that they had found a house she must live in, like Thoreau’s, on a pond. It was a shack, really, that had been used in the fall by duck-hunters—two tiny rooms and a kitchen, with only a fireplace to heat them and a kitchen range. At night, in her bunk-bed, Dolly protested, she was cold, but John and Martha had laughed and told her to sleep in woolen socks and sweaters. Dolly feared that she would offend them if she went to Digby and bought an electric blanket; they were very set in their notions of what was fitting for her.

  Dolly was a year younger than Martha and still unmarried, which had resigned her to being prescribed for by everybody, as if she had an ailment. She was a distant cousin of John’s and had been at college with Martha, in the class below. She was tall and long-legged and curiously flattened out, like a cloth doll that had been dressed and redressed by many imperious mistresses. She had a neat round little face that came to a point unexpectedly in a firm, slightly jutting chin, short crisp blond hair, of a silvery cast, a silvery quiet laugh, and bright silver-blue eyes that shone with a high gleam, as if they had just been polished. Her pink cheeks and ears had a faintly angry, scrubbed look. In her unusual style, she was remarkably pretty—like a china shepherdess, said some people; like a gray nun, said others; like a mermaid, like a scalloped Spode plate, like a heron, like a shingled, weathered cottage, like a Swiss clock with bells and a maiden inside. It was Dolly’s fate to evoke fanciful comparisons, to be, as Martha said, a posse rather than an esse to everyone who knew her. She was too inscrutable, said Martha; that was why she had not got married—men did not think she was real. John said it was her shyness and the fact that she had been brought up by two eccentric aunts, who had died and left her their money. An orphan, he said, was just a figment who was sentimentalized b
y the whole world, like the heroine of a storybook; Dolly had never had any real privacy to develop herself in. Ever since Martha had known her, she had been under trustees.

  She was now giving Martha tea and English muffins, which she was toasting with a fork over the fire. Her face was bright with the heat and puckered with a frown of concentration; this thoughtful, anxious, winsome look was typical of all the serious, clever girls she and Martha had been friends with at college. They bent their soft brows in continual perplexity, as if a teacher had just asked them a probing question. Dolly was gentler and more reserved than Martha; she was ironic where Martha was satiric and modest where Martha was vain. But just these differences, as in two sisters, pointed up the likeness between them—a likeness that reassured them, even though they affected to deprecate it. Martha today had come to talk to Dolly about Miles, and she felt a little guilty about it because it was the first time, in seven years, that she had reposed her confidence in anybody but John. “I’ll just stop and leave Dolly some tarragon,” she had called out to him, as she drove off. “Have a good time,” he advised, and Martha could not make out whether this meant that he saw through her excuse.