Mary McCarthy

by Mary McCarthy

  Yet now a distinction must be made. In some cases, it is our wife or our husband who is the direct object of our envy and our desire, and in these marriages the friends are mere accidental victims; we have nothing against them personally; if we hate them it is because we have seen them smiling with our wife. But there is another kind of marriage, where it is the partner who is the accidental victim: simply a hostage whom we have carried home from a raid on the enemy, that is, on the circle of the friends. We bear this person no actual ill-will; we may even pity him as we lop off an ear or a little finger in some nicety of reprisal. He himself is not the object of revenge, he is merely the symbol of our hostility, usually for some group, class, caste, sex, or race. Such cases are generally marked by a crude and striking disparity between the husband and the wife; observe the communist married to the banker’s daughter, the anti-Semite who marries the beautiful Jewess, the businessman who marries an actress and makes her quit the stage. These marriages are exercises in metonymy: the part is taken for the whole, the symbol for the thing symbolized. One might think, in the case of the businessman and the actress, that he had taken leave of his senses—why marry an actress if not to sit in the front row at her first nights?—if one did not know that his college life had been poisoned by his failure to make the Thespian Society, and that his secret vendetta against the stage had already expressed itself in certain Times Square real estate operations, in investments in radio and movie companies, and, once, in an anonymous note addressed to the Commissioner of Licenses pointing out an indelicate passage in a current Broadway hit. The communist who subjects the banker’s daughter to the petty squalor of life on Thirteenth Street—the unmade studio couch, the tin of evaporated milk flanking the rank brass ash tray on the breakfast table, the piles of dusty pamphlets, the late meetings, the cheap whiskey without soda, the hair done over the wash-basin with wave-set bought from a cut-rate druggist—this man may be actually repelled by the conditions in which he obliges her to live; but his home is a stage kept set for the call her horrified father will pay them. And the anti-Semite who marries a beautiful Jewess may imagine that he has been carried away by love, treat her with great kindness, and exempt her from the Jewish race by a kind of personal fiat, declaring over and over again to himself and possibly to her that he married her in spite of her relations, her mother, her sister, her hook-nosed uncles, while in reality he is bored with his wife (who actually does not seem very Jewish), and it is the yearly visit of his mother-in-law to which he looks forward with sadistic zest. Summer after summer, he may promise his wife that he will not use the word “kike” in the old lady’s hearing again, but somehow it always slides out, the old lady goes upstairs in tears, and the marriage has once again been consummated.

  This distinction must be noted for the sake of clarity, though to the friends and to the wives and the husbands it makes really very little difference whether they are disliked for themselves or for some more irrelevant reason. The child struck by a bomb is indifferent to the private motives of the bombardier. Thus, with the Leighton couple, to return to our original question, Mrs. Leighton may have detested Hugh Caldwell because he or someone like him had once run a crayon through her sketch at a night class at the Art Students League or because she was a stylist at Macy’s and he a practicing nudist, or for any other reason that sprang from a divergence of interests. Or she may have found only one thing to disparage in Mr. Caldwell—his feeling of friendship for her husband. In either case, the result would be the same; whether from inclination or merely to spite her husband, Mrs. Leighton would see to it that Mr. Caldwell was not at home in her nice new house.

  There are people who, whatever their good intentions, cannot renounce love, and there are people, a larger number, who cannot renounce victory. Thus, to take the second category first, a woman like Mrs. Leighton is not playing the game when she pretends to have sacrificed something by having only Francis Clearys at her parties; the jealousy and anger of the excluded Hugh Caldwell more than repay her for any superficial boredom she may have experienced during the evening. A still worse cheat is the anti-Semite who asks a Jewish Francis Cleary, a second cousin of his wife’s, time after time to his house so that he may later express the most cruel and hair-raising opinions without being accused of bias. Most monstrous of all was the businessman already alluded to who married the actress and whose hatred of theatrical people stopped short of a young Francis Cleary, a radio actor with whom the wife had once played a season of summer stock. This man, whose name was Al, enacted for several months a pseudo-friendship with Francis. He invited him to lunch downtown, introduced him to radio magnates, listened to his morning broadcasts; the wife, the former actress, was at first bewildered and touched by these attentions, which she conceived to be overtures of love, and she began to look forward to the time when the house would be filled with her real friends, the playwrights, directors, and legitimate actors whom she missed so much in the country. It was not until her husband began to talk continually of the superiority of the verse drama of the air to the box-like drama of the stage that she perceived the malignancy of his design. Her answer was direct and militant. She treated Francis exactly as if he had been a genuine enthusiasm of her husband’s—one night, without the slightest provocation, she turned him out of the house.

  This shocking experience was crucial for the young actor Francis Cleary. It confirmed in him the sense, not yet quite solidified, of the perils of his position. For nearly two hours, as he paced the station platform, waiting for the train that would take him away from Fairfield County, away from important men who professed to admire Norman Corwin and were going to take him to lunch with the president of the Red Network, for this long-short intolerable time, he felt himself identified with the lot of humanity, with the mothers-in-law, sisters, true friends, ex-lovers for whom life is a series of indignities, with all those who, having attached themselves, are in a position to be dislodged. His heart cried out against the false husband who had not raised a hand to save him; it cried out and at length he hardened it. From this time on, Francis took the most energetic measures lest the taint of affection poison one of his friendships, and his reluctance to be identified with either partner to a marriage passed as devotion to the family, especially in doubtful cases like the Leightons’, where to avoid the slightest appearance of partisanship, he concentrated his attention on the children and was always playing games with them on the floor or taking them out to the zoo or to holiday marionette shows—to the point that many of his friends kept remarking to each other that it was such a pity that Francis had never married because he was obviously mad about children. And though many of the children did not at all care for Francis and would even prefer sitting at a bar while their father drank with some dubious confederate to the most delightful outing Francis could offer them, others, more successfully educated by their parents, would take the name for the thing and being told that Francis adored them would docilely adore him back, to the limit, at any rate, of their capacities. But in either case, the mother, watching her child set out hand in hand with Francis to some accepted childish objective, was spared the slightest misgiving lest the child positively enjoy himself with Francis. Her own feelings about Francis assured her that there was no danger whatever that the child would get anything better than what he was used to at home.

  In most instances, these precautionary measures were sufficient to keep Francis his status as friend. He watched, with professional amusement, the struggles of his younger counterparts to extricate themselves from the depths of a closer relation. He himself could never again be fooled when a husband or a wife, out of sheer malignance, would pretend to like him, seek out his company, complain that he was not asked to dinner often enough, lunch with him frequently alone, strike up a correspondence with him, till the other member of the couple would go nearly mad with exasperation and feelings of injustice, asking himself (if it were the husband) a hundred times a day how Dorothea could tolerate that lumpish little bore when
she had a tantrum in the bedroom every time one of his real friends, one of his interesting friends, set a foot in the apartment. Francis could foretell, almost to the hour, the date of the inevitable rupture, and if it had not been for professional competition he might have warned his young namesake not to go to the Leightons on the night that John Leighton, for absolutely no reason, would break a highball glass over his head. He himself practiced such discretion in these matters that he occasionally resorted to flight when there was no real necessity for it. The smallest compliment paid him by a husband or a wife would make him suspect a danger, and he would scurry away to safety before the friendship had got half started, while the couple, who had been counting on him to replace the people they liked in their social life and had no morbid designs at all, would ask themselves what they could have done to offend that nice Mr. Cleary.

  The night on the station platform had left him with its mark. Where formerly the desire to be loved, noticed, esteemed, had, if it ever feebly stirred in him, been repressed without a pang, now the fear of being loved became a positive obsession with him. He saw annihilation stare at him in any half-affectionate glance. Though his whole activity was given over to the manipulation of the symbols of devotion—presents, visits, solicitous inquiries, games, walks in the country—still the validation of a single one of these tokens would suffice to ruin him, just as, it is presumed, the introduction of a single five-dollar gold piece into the channels of our currency would upset our entire monetary system. The liking of a single human being would translate him into the realm of measures and values, the realm of comparisons. Someone had valued him, and the whole question of his value was opened. From being a zero, the dead point at which reckoning begins, he became a real number, if only the tiniest fraction, and thus entered the field of competition. Or to put it another way, he passed from being an x, an unknown and inestimable quantity which could be substituted for a known quantity (Hugh Caldwell) in any social equation, to being a known quantity himself, that is he passed from algebra into arithmetic. He no longer represented Hugh Caldwell, but existing now on the same plane was capable of being compared with him. However, his whole merit had consisted of the fact that nobody could possibly like him as much as Hugh Caldwell could be liked; and indeed if anybody liked him one-half, one-quarter, one-tenth as much, it was enough to finish him as the family friend.

  A husband, hearing his wife’s voice quicken as she answered Francis Cleary’s telephone call, would be startled into asking himself the impermissible question: Why do we see that fellow? The light fervor of his wife’s tone jarred on his sense of what was fitting; it breached some unspoken agreement—she was not playing fair. He felt as if he had been duped. From that moment on, he disliked Francis Cleary intensely, and his wife would have to fight to get him invited to a party, just as if he had been one of her own friends. If she were loyal in her attachments, she would soon find herself trying to see him when her husband was out of town or working late at the office; she would meet him between engagements in the bars of quiet hotels. But this illicit atmosphere was deeply uncongenial to Francis. Her affection, her fidelity, could not begin to make up to him for the fact that he was no longer asked to her house. Indeed he hated her for that affection, which, as he saw it, was responsible for all the trouble. Like the husband, he experienced a sense of outrage; he too had been betrayed by her. With her inordinate capacity for friendship, she had gulled them both. She, on her side, became aware that Francis was suffering from his exclusion. She imagined (this particular wife was rather stupid) that he missed his old friend, her husband; and to save Francis pain she began to lie. “Jerry misses you terribly,” she would tell him, “but we see hardly anybody any more. Jerry hasn’t been feeling well. We stay home and read detective stories. . . .” Francis, of course, knew better, and eventually it would happen that he met them when they were dining out with a large party of friends, and the poor wife’s duplicity would be exposed. All her nudges and desperate, appealing glances went unanswered—Jerry would not invite Francis to sit down at their table. After that, Francis was always too busy to see her when she called. If anybody mentioned her name, he spoke of her with a rancor that was for him unusual, so that people assumed either that she had come between Francis and his old friend, her husband, or that she had tried to have an affair with Francis and failed. Of the husband he continued to speak in the highest terms, thus reinforcing both of these theories. And his admiration was not simulated. He respected Jerry for the contempt in which Jerry held him—it was an attitude they shared. As for the unfortunate wife, she could never make out what had gone wrong. In the end, she came to believe her husband when he told her, as he frequently did, that she had no talent for human relations.

  Between the Scylla of an Al and the Charybdis of a Jerry’s wife, Francis steers his uneasy course. Perhaps it is the vicissitudes of this life, the vigilance against the true and imaginary dangers, that are responsible for the change in Francis. Certainly it has been hard for him to be obliged, every year or so, to re-examine his premises. Francis had, it seemed to him, made a good bargain with the world. Yet whenever a Jerry’s wife took a fancy to him, he questioned his own shrewdness. If she likes me, he would ask himself, why wouldn’t others, and if likes, why not loves, and does she really and how much? It would be weeks, after such an experience, before Francis could silence these questions. Like a businessman, he feared that he had closed his deal with life too soon; the buyer might have paid much more. And as the businessman can only set his mind at rest by assuring himself that the property he disposed of was really good riddance of a negligible asset, so Francis’ one recourse was to persuade himself once again that he had been perfectly correct in setting the zero, dejected yet triumphant, opposite his own name. But however successful as auditing, these midnight reckonings must have been painful, even to Francis; one night his anesthetized spirit must have awakened in rage and spite.

  Or perhaps nature does abhor a vacuum; perhaps the wall of the sealed, sterile chamber that was Francis’ nature collapsed from atmospheric pressure, and in rushed all the unattached emotions—that is, hatred, envy, fear, which, unlike love, do not cling to a definite object—that float, gaseous, over man’s sphere. At any rate, Francis has been changing. Under our very eyes, he has been turning into everything that he, by definition, was not. If you have failed to notice the steps in this process, it is because you are so much in the habit of not thinking about Francis that he could transform himself into a snake on your parlor floor without attracting your attention. Your indifference has been a cloak of invisibility behind which he has been preparing for you some rather startling surprises. But now that your memory has been jogged on the point, you will recall that his manners, while never highly polished, were once more acceptable than they are today. There was a time, for example, when he left your cocktail parties promptly at seven-thirty, taking with him one of the more burdensome women guests for a table-d’hôte dinner in the Village. But in the course of years his leavetakings have been steadily retarded; soon your wife has been cooking scrambled eggs for him at nine o’clock; and now you are lucky if at midnight or two or three you do not have to make up a bed for him in the spare room or, at the very best, take him home in a taxi and open his door for him. Once it was the interesting guests who stayed, disputing, quoting poetry, playing the piano, singing; today the fascinating people have always somewhere else to go, and every party boils down to Francis Cleary; you do not question this, possibly, but accept it as an analogy to life.