Mary McCarthy

by Mary McCarthy

  This time she heard her husband’s footsteps approaching, but out of pride she would not look up, even when she felt him stop just behind her at the entrance to the garden. “Gosh!” he said. “What an awful situation!” “Yes,” she answered defiantly. “It’s ruined.” There was a silence during which she imagined him to be shrugging his shoulders. Anger began to boil up in her again, and she spun around to face him. The language of their old quarrels rose to her lips, the classical formulae of accusation and outrage. (See what you have made me do, you wanted this to happen, you are glad), but she was arrested by the expression of his face, which was neither jubilant nor indifferent, but full of simple curiosity and wonder. The weeds had finally made their impression on him; never before had he really believed in them; he had considered them to be a chimera of her dark imagination. Now he stood awestruck by this fearful demonstration of their authenticity, and for the first time the two of them shared in silence a single emotion. “What is that awful stuff?” he asked at length, bending down to pull up a spear of nut grass. The root broke off in his inexperienced hands. “Not that way,” she said. “Look.” Her trowel came up with the nut secure. “This is the weed I’ve been talking about all spring.” He examined it, turning it over between his fingers in his methodical way. “Why, it’s a little bulb,” he said. It was not worthwhile to correct this statement; to make the botanical distinction between a bulb and a tuber might simply provide a distraction from the mood of repugnance and terror that had brought them close for a moment. She longed to rush him ahead with her into the particulars of her loss, to say, See what I have been up against, see the sorrel, the field grass, the carrotweed, see where the sweet peas would have been, see where I dug the trench and strewed it with manure, think of the liming and the watering and weeding; she was filled with a kind of wild excitement and joy that he, who had never acknowledged the garden in life, should meet it, as it were, posthumously, and pay his respects. Yet prudence or tact restrained her. The work of initiation could not be hurried. He stood on the brink of her agony in the garden; his wide feet in their brown shoes were planted on one of the surviving cornflowers, as though to illustrate the text of his inculpation—but he must not be pushed. It was enough that he should share, however vaguely, her burden of loss, that her bereavement should to some measure be accepted as his. She waited, half-frightened, half-exalted, for what he would say next.

  “Gosh!” he repeated, with intensified feeling, and now she was sure it was coming, the miracle she expected, which might take the form of an embrace, a cry, an apology, but which would be in essence a lament, not so much for the garden as for her, for the dead young lady he had brought back from New York, whom he kept propped up in bed, at the breakfast table, on the sofa, in the odor of corruption.

  “You have your work cut out for you,” he said. For an instant she believed that she had not heard him properly.

  “Maybe we can get a boy to help you,” he continued in a matter-of-fact tone.

  It was over, she knew it at once, yet she made a last appeal. “The garden is ruined,” she said in a stubborn, hostile voice, but speaking slowly and emphatically as though to direct his attention to the importance of this statement.

  “Nonsense,” he replied briskly. “You are always so extreme. I’ll call up Mr. Jenkins tomorrow and see if he can send . . .”

  At the mention of the neighboring farmer, her mouth opened and she began to scream. “I’ll kill you if you do!” she shouted. Picking up the spading fork, she plunged it wildly into the ground, tossing sods and plants into the air in a frenzy of destruction. The loose earth fell on her hair, on her face, down which tears were running. She was aware that she cut a grotesque and even repulsive figure, that her husband was shocked by the sight and the sound of her, but the gasping sobs gave her pleasure, for she saw that this was the only punishment she had left for him, that the witchlike aspect of her form and the visible decay of her spirit would constitute, in the end, her revenge. She continued to lay about her with the spading fork, though the original fury had already passed off, until his solid, uneasy figure had disappeared from view, until his last words no longer sounded in her ears.

  It was late in August when he came into the living room with a heterogeneous bouquet in which she recognized some of the stubborner flowers of her garden, cosmos and cornflowers and a few blackish red miniature zinnias. Mixed in with these were some weeds, pinkish sprays of bouncing Bet and the greenish-white clusters of Queen Anne’s lace. There was no doubt of it, he had been visiting her garden, and this was not the first time. Toward the end of June she had heard him outside the window, swearing, as he tied up rambler roses; in July, he had brought in raspberries, saying, “Can’t we have these for dinner?” The berries were soft and broken—he had been too late in the harvest. She lay now on the sofa, reading a detective story, watching him as he brought in a vase too tall for his bouquet and crammed the flowers into it. She felt no impulse to correct him; his clumsiness, in fact, pleased her, the ugliness of the bouquet pleased her, just as the stain on the coffee table had pleased her, the spot on her maid’s uniform at lunch. She basked, as she had been doing all summer, in a sly private satisfaction. She was broken but she was also irreplaceable, and her continued physical existence must be, she thought, an unending reminder to him of everything he had lost. She was enjoying in real life the delight that is generally experienced only in daydreams, the sense of when I am dead, how they will mourn for me, how valuable I shall become to them when I am no longer theirs.

  She could see her own case now with the detachment of a historian. Between them, he and she had killed off the part of her that had always excited his anxiety and irritation, the part of her which regarded nothing as final, which was continually planning, contriving, hoping, which lived in the future and slept, like a fireman, fully dressed for an emergency. It was this part of her which had dreamed of flight and deliverance, but it was also this part which had created for itself the small mirages of duty and pleasure which had held her to him for five years. These were not, as she had thought, antithetical selves, but the same thing, the creative, constructive principle which, in its restless anticipation of change, built structures of semi-permanency—a series of overnight cabins that in their extension formed, not precisely a city, but at least a road, a via vitae.

  It was this part of her which had incurred his jealousy, for it was obliged to live slightly estranged, to make large investments of passion in private enterprises; yet it was this part of her he now wished back, for he saw that this had been the nerve, and he now longed for a recurrence of the very symptoms whose presence, three months ago, he had detested. Now, by a hundred spells, he was attempting to bring about a resurrection. He appealed to her housekeeping instinct, to her esthetic sense, to her vanity, to her pity; his very clumsiness was an appeal for help, and it was not that she did not hear these appeals; she heard, but, as in a dream, she was incapable of action. What it was all leading up to she understood plainly: a moment ought to come when she would rise miraculously from the sofa, sweep the absurd bouquet from his hands, shake it lightly into form, call for a new bowl, and enshrine the product on the mantelpiece, while he stood by, awkward and grateful, as at a religious ceremony, a secular Easter mass. Yet now she could only lie back and watch, with lowered eyelids, pretending to take no notice, enjoying her poor-man’s pie of irony and contempt.

  For the pleasure she took in her untended house, in her careless and unsupervised maid, in her neglected garden (which, however, she had never, since June, seen) was purely negative in character, a compensation for disability. The discomfort inflicted on her husband by the loss of her imaginative faculty could never atone to her for the joy she had once had in the exercise of it. Lying on the sofa, looking about at the dusty bare room, she would feel excruciating stabs of remorse, like the pains in an amputated limb. She would get up and start at some task, but before the candlesticks were half polished, her interest would have died and she would
leave them in the sink for her maid to finish. It could not, it seemed to her, go on much longer, and she prayed for him to abandon her. (Her going, on her own initiative, had become utterly out of the question.) On him her life now depended; where renunciation, the withdrawal of love, had blackened the loved objects as frost blackens the flowers in an autumn garden, he alone had survived, evergreen, sturdily perennial, in the season of death. Disliking him as she did, she had never bothered to renounce him, and now her eyes would come to rest on him with a kind of relief—the familiar detested object in surroundings grown strange and terrible. Her glance held in it also an element of calculation: how long, she asked herself, will he be able to stand me? Her own endurance had become infinite, for she no longer lived in time, but he, being real, being alive, might reach in measurable stages the threshold of domestic suffering.

  He set the vase down on the table, took his handkerchief, and dusted the surface in a rather bustling way, like a woman who rattles dishes in the kitchen to awaken a sleeper whom she does not wish to be so rude as to call. He cleared his throat.

  “You have some beautiful flowers out back.”

  She sat up at last to look at him directly, but made no reply.

  “You ought to go out and see them.”

  She watched him hesitate and then think better of what was in his mind to say. He is afraid of me, she thought, with a touch of pity.

  “We ought to have some more of them in the house,” he continued, enthusiastically. “You have got all sorts of things back there. Even your weeds are wonderful,” and he went rattling on nervously, describing the scene in the fields, suggesting improvements—a professional tree surgeon to come for the old apple trees, a wattled fence along the lane, plans she had once proposed and he rejected. She was only half listening; the very idea of these improvements now seemed to her preposterous; one might as well paint a mural in a condemned house.

  Seeing that she would not reply, he halted and tried a new tack. He came up to her and took her hand. “I miss the way this room used to look,” he said in a voice that was quite new with him, wistful and childlike in its directness. “Those yellow things you used to have on the coffee table.” For a moment now, she saw it all through his eyes, saw a vision which was less precise and accurate than hers, a rather smeary vision in which the pale, clear, lemon yellow he was thinking of (African marigold, carnation-flowered, yellow supreme) was likely to be confused with the orange of French marigold or of cosmos orange flare, a vision in which energy and whopping good intentions counted for more than anything else and the bigger a flower the better—but nevertheless a vision, an ideal of beauty, of love and the lavish hand; and the sense of his loss, his large, vague loss, overwhelmed and engulfed her own.

  She pressed his hand lightly, murmuring, “Yes, I remember,” and then let his fingers drop. He regained her hand, however, and squeezed it. She felt, as once before in the fields, that he was on the verge of some fine avowal. She herself, only now, had made the great leap from pity to sympathy; she grieved for his predicament, of which she herself was the determining factor; could he likewise grieve for hers, whose existence he had never acknowledged, weep with her at last because she could not leave him, because the courage, the more attractive alternative, whatever it was that might separate them, was lacking? “I’ve always loved your flowers,” he said, his voice blurred and high with emotion. “You know that.”

  As her ears admitted this lie, this tearful, sentimental, brazen lie, her whole nature rose weakly in rebellion. How dare you, her heart muttered, how dare you say it? Nothing could have been—and at such a moment!—more dishonest; she could have cited him fifty instances which would have controverted him utterly. But the heartfelt insincerity of these words went beyond contradiction, beyond hypocrisy, into regions of spiritual obstinacy and opacity impenetrable to reason, where reason, in fact, and conscience had been cruelly blinded by the will, the will which demanded that everything should be always all right, which had, as it were, legislated the bouquet on the mantelpiece by a kind of brutal denial of color, of tonal values, of the harmony of textures, and which was now enforcing its myth of a harmonious marriage, of tastes and occupations shared, by dictatorial fiat.

  And yet there had been the tears in the voice. . . . What the tears meant, she perceived, was that he did love the flowers, now that she had not got them, now that they were no longer dangerous; they had passed, for him and for her, out of experience into memory, and here in this twilight world he could possess them—and her—with a terrible blind rapacity. She saw also that her pity had been wasted, that he had got her where he wanted her; she had been translated, bodily, into that realm of shadows where the will was all-powerful, the city of the dead. She herself was no more to him now than an oak leaf pressed in a schoolbook, a tendril of blond hair, a garter kept in a drawer. But this was, for him, everything: it was love and idolatry. The lie was a necessity to him, a cardinal article of faith. To protest was useless. He could not be shaken in his conviction, but only be annoyed, confused, thrown off. And in a final thrust of rejection, she yielded, conceding him everything—flowers, facts, truth. Let him put them into his authorized version; she had failed them, and would do so again and again. With him, they would see service.

  She tightened her clasp on his hand.

  “Yes,” she said mistily, “I know.”

  The lie came easier, after all, than she would have thought.

  The Friend of the Family

  HIS GREAT QUALIFICATION was that nobody liked him very much. That is, nobody liked him enough to make a point of him. Consequently, among the married couples he knew, he was universally popular. Since nobody cherished him, swore by him, quoted his jokes or his political prophecies, nobody else felt obliged to diminish him; on the contrary, the husbands or wives of his friends were always discovering in him virtues their partners had never noticed, and a husband who was notorious for detesting the whole imposing suite of his wife’s acquaintance would make an enthusiasm of the obscure Francis Cleary, whom up to that time the wife had seldom thought about. In the long war of marriage, in the battle of the friends, Francis Cleary was an open city. Undefended, he remained immune, as though an inconspicuous white flag fluttered in his sharkskin lapel. The very mention of his name brought a certain kind of domestic argument to a dead stop. (“You don’t like my friends.” “I do too like your friends.” “No, you don’t, you hate them.” “That’s not true,” and—triumphantly—“I like Francis Cleary.”)

  A symbol of tolerance, of the spirit of compromise, he came into his own whenever one of his friends married. A man who in his single state had lunched with Francis Cleary once or twice a year would discover to his astonishment, after two or three years of marriage, that Francis Cleary was now his closest friend: he was invited regularly for weekends, for dinner, for cocktail parties; he made the invariable fourth at bridge or tennis. Though he might never have been asked to the wedding ceremony (and in fact it was more usual for the wife to have him introduced to her quite by chance a few months later, in a restaurant, and to experience a kind of Aristotelian recognition—“Why hasn’t Jack ever spoken of you? You must come to dinner next Thursday”), his azalea plant or cyclamen would be the first to arrive at the hospital when the baby was born.

  If it was the wife who had originally been Francis Cleary’s friend, the graph of intimacy would follow the same curve. A mild admirer who had always figured in the background of her life, imperceptibly he would have slid to the very center of the composition: he came to stay for two weeks in the summer, played chess with her husband, and took her to dinner when she was alone in town. He had become “your friend Francis Cleary,” a walking advertisement of her husband’s good nature. “How can you say I am jealous?” he would ask. “You had lunch with Francis Cleary only last week.” Left by herself with this old friend, she would—as she had always done—get bored, play the phonograph, make excuses to go to the kitchen to see how the maid was getting along with the
hollandaise. Yet at her husband’s suggestion she would invite him again and again, because his presence in the house reassured her, told her that marriage had not really changed her, that she was still free to see her own friends, that her husband was a generous, fair-minded man who could not, naturally, be expected to share every one of her tastes. Moreover, it was so easy to have Francis Cleary. When her real friends came, something unpleasant usually happened—an argument, an ill-considered reference to the past—or if nothing actually happened, she suffered in the expectation of its happening, so that when they finally left she echoed her husband’s “Thank God, that’s over!” in the silence of her heart. A few awkward evenings, a weekend would serve, in most cases, to convince her that the love she felt for her friends was a positive obstacle to her happiness; and she would renounce it, though perhaps only provisionally (telling herself that surely, later on, in precisely the right circumstances Jim would come to see these people as she did—just as she was sure that sometime, next week or next year, Jim would come to like string beans, if she served them to him in a moment of intimacy and with precisely the right sauce). Meanwhile, however, it was certainly better to have Francis Cleary, who was after all a close friend of her real friends (had she not met him through them?), and as the years passed the distinction between her “real” friends and Francis Cleary would blur in her mind and she would imagine that he had always been one of her dearest associates.