The Company She Keeps

by Mary McCarthy

  They met often, also, at the houses of friends, for, as she said, “What can I do? I know it’s not tactful, but we all know the same people. You can’t expect me to give up my friends.” These Public Appearances were heightened in interest by the fact that these audiences, unlike the earlier ones, had, as it were, purchased librettos, and were in full possession of the intricacies of the plot. She preferred, she decided, the evening parties to the cocktail parties, for there she could dance alternately with her lover and her husband to the accompaniment of subdued gasps on the part of the bystanders.

  This interlude was at the same time festive and heartrending: her only dull moments were the evenings she spent alone with the Young Man. Unfortunately, the Post-Announcement period was only too plainly an interlude and its very nature demanded that it be followed by something else. She could not preserve her anomalous status indefinitely. It was not decent, and, besides, people would be bored. From the point of view of one’s friends, it was all very well to entertain a Triangle as a novelty; to cope with it as a permanent problem was a different matter. Once they had all three got drunk, and there was a scene, and, though everyone talked about it afterwards, her friends were, she thought, a little colder, a little more critical. People began to ask her when she was going to Reno. Furthermore, she noticed that her husband was getting a slight edge in popularity over the Young Man. It was natural, of course, that everyone should feel sorry for him, and be especially nice. But yet …

  When she learned from her husband that he was receiving attentions from members of her own circle, invitations in which she and the Young Man were unaccountably not included, she went at once to the station and bought her ticket. Her good-bye to her husband, which she had privately allocated to her last hours in town, took place prematurely, two days before she was to leave. He was rushing off to what she inwardly feared was a Gay Week End in the country; he had only a few minutes; he wished her a pleasant trip; and he would write, of course. His highball was drained while her glass still stood half full; he sat forward nervously on his chair; and she knew herself to be acting the Ancient Mariner, but her dignity would not allow her to hurry. She hoped that he would miss his train for her, but he did not. He left her sitting in the bar, and that night the Young Man could not, as he put it, do a thing with her. There was nowhere, absolutely nowhere, she said passionately, that she wanted to go, nobody she wanted to see, nothing she wanted to do. “You need a drink,” he said with the air of a diagnostician. “A drink,” she answered bitterly. “I’m sick of the drinks we’ve been having. Gin, whisky, rum, what else is there?” He took her into a bar, and she cried, but he bought her a fancy mixed drink, something called a Ramos gin fizz, and she was a little appeased because she had never had one before. Then some friends came in, and they all had another drink together, and she felt better. “There,” said the Young Man, on the way home, “don’t I know what’s good for you? Don’t I know how to handle you?” “Yes,” she answered in her most humble and feminine tones, but she knew that they had suddenly dropped into a new pattern, that they were no longer the cynosure of a social group, but merely another young couple with an evening to pass, another young couple looking desperately for entertainment, wondering whether to call on a married couple or to drop in somewhere for a drink. This time the Young Man’s prescription had worked, but it was pure luck that they had chanced to meet someone they knew. A second or a third time they would scan the faces of the other drinkers in vain, would order a second drink and surreptitiously watch the door, and finally go out alone, with a quite detectable air of being unwanted.

  When, a day and a half later, the Young Man came late to take her to the train, and they had to run down the platform to catch it, she found him all at once detestable. He would ride to 125th Street with her, he declared in a burst of gallantry, but she was angry all the way because she was afraid there would be trouble with the conductor. At 125th Street, he stood on the platform blowing kisses to her and shouting something that she could not hear through the glass. She made a gesture of repugnance, but, seeing him flinch, seeing him weak and charming and incompetent, she brought her hand reluctantly to her lips and blew a kiss back. The other passengers were watching, she was aware, and though their looks were doting and not derisive, she felt herself to be humiliated and somehow vulgarized. When the train began to move, and the Young Man began to run down the platform after it, still blowing kisses and shouting alternately, she got up, turned sharply away from the window and walked back to the club car. There she sat down and ordered a whisky and soda.

  There were a number of men in the car, who looked up in unison as she gave her order, but, observing that they were all the middle-aged, small-businessmen who “belonged” as inevitably to the club car as the white-coated porter and the leather-bound Saturday Evening Post, she paid them no heed. She was now suddenly overcome by a sense of depression and loss that was unprecedented for being in no way dramatic or pleasurable. In the last half-hour she had seen clearly that she would never marry the Young Man, and she found herself looking into an insubstantial future with no signpost to guide her. Almost all women, she thought, when they are girls never believe that they will get married. The terror of spinsterhood hangs over them from adolescence on. Even if they are popular they think that no one really interesting will want them enough to marry them. Even if they get engaged they are afraid that something will go wrong, something will intervene. When they do get married it seems to them a sort of miracle, and, after they have been married for a time, though in retrospect the whole process looks perfectly natural and inevitable, they retain a certain unarticulated pride in the wonder they have performed. Finally, however, the terror of spinsterhood has been so thoroughly exorcised that they forget ever having been haunted by it, and it is at this stage that they contemplate divorce. “How could I have forgotten?” she said to herself and began to wonder what she would do.

  She could take an apartment by herself in the Village. She would meet new people. She would entertain. But, she thought, if I have people in for cocktails, there will always come the moment when they have to leave, and I shall be alone and have to pretend to have another engagement in order to save embarrassment. If I have them to dinner, it will be the same thing, but at least I shan’t have to pretend to have an engagement. I will give dinners. Then, she thought, there will be the cocktail parties, and, if I go alone, I shall always stay a little too late, hoping that a young man or even a party of people will ask me to dinner. And if I fail, if no one asks me, I shall have the ignominy of walking out alone, trying to look as if I had somewhere to go. Then there will be the evenings at home with a good book when there will be no reason at all for going to bed, and I shall perhaps sit up all night. And the mornings when there will be no point in getting up, and I shall perhaps stay in bed till dinnertime. There will be the dinners in tearooms with other unmarried women, tearooms because women alone look conspicuous and forlorn in good restaurants. And then, she thought, I shall get older.

  She would never, she reflected angrily, have taken this step, had she felt that she was burning her bridges behind her. She would never have left one man unless she had had another to take his place. But the Young Man, she now saw, was merely a sort of mirage which she had allowed herself to mistake for an oasis. “If the Man,” she muttered, “did not exist, the Moment would create him.” This was what had happened to her. She had made herself the victim of an imposture. But, she argued, with an access of cheerfulness, if this were true, if out of the need of a second, a new, husband she had conjured up the figure of one, she had possibly been impelled by unconscious forces to behave more intelligently than appearances would indicate. She was perhaps acting out in a sort of hypnotic trance a ritual whose meaning had not yet been revealed to her, a ritual which required that, first of all, the Husband be eliminated from the cast of characters. Conceivably, she was designed for the role of femme fatale, and for such a personage considerations of safety, provisions against
loneliness and old age, were not only philistine but irrelevant. She might marry a second, a third, a fourth time, or she might never marry again. But, in any case, for the thrifty bourgeois love insurance, with its daily payments of patience, forbearance, and resignation, she was no longer eligible. She would be, she told herself delightedly, a bad risk.

  She was, or soon would be, a Young Divorcee, and the term still carried glamour. Her divorce decree would be a passport conferring on her the status of citizeness of the world. She felt gratitude toward the Young Man for having unwittingly effected her transit into a new life. She looked about her at the other passengers. Later she would talk to them. They would ask, of course, where she was bound; that was the regulation opening move of train conversations. But it was a delicate question what her reply should be. To say “Reno” straight out would be vulgar; it would smack of confidences too cheaply given. Yet to lie, to say “San Francisco,” for instance, would be to cheat herself, to minimize her importance, to mislead her interlocutor into believing her an ordinary traveler with a commonplace destination. There must be some middle course which would give information without appearing to do so, which would hint at a vie galante yet indicate a barrier of impeccable reserve. It would probably be best, she decided, to say “West” at first, with an air of vagueness and hesitation. Then, when pressed, she might go as far as to say “Nevada.” But no farther.

  TWO

  Rogue’s Gallery*

  MR. SHEER FIRED HIS stenographer in order to give me the job. It puzzled me at the time that he should so readily dismiss a professional whom he paid ten dollars a week to take on an amateur at eleven. I now see that he must have owed her money. Several times during that summer she would come into the gallery, a badly made-up blond girl in a dark dress that the hot days and the continual sitting had wrinkled at the waist. He would hold whispered conversations with her in the outer room, and at length she would go away. Later on, after I had quit, I, too, would make regular calls to collect my back pay, and there would be another girl sitting at my desk, while I, as a mark of special courtesy, would be led into the inner exhibition room reserved for customers. There he would whisper to me, and, on a few occasions, press into my hand, as if it were something indecent, a tightly folded five-dollar bill. After a great many visits I succeeded in getting, in such small driblets, all that was owed me, but my case was exceptional. Mr. Sheer’s usual method of dealing with a creditor was simply to dispense with his services. This worked quite well with everyone but the telephone company, for, while there are many stationers, many photographers, many landlords, there is only one American Tel. & Tel.

  Mr. Sheer was extremely resourceful in financial matters. It was he who taught me how to get a free lemonade on a stifling day. You go into the Automat (there was one conveniently located across the street from our building), and you pick up several of the slices of lemon that are put out for the benefit of tea drinkers near the tea tap. Then you pour yourself a glass of ice water, squeeze the lemon into it, add sugar from one of the tables, and stir.

  Mr. Sheer was a dealer in objects of art, a tall, pale-eyed man with two suits and many worries. Downstairs in the building directory he was listed as The Savile Galleries, and the plural conveyed a sense of endless vistas of rooms gleaming with collector’s items. Like Mr. Sheer himself, that plural was imaginative, winged with ambition, but untrustworthy. Actually, the Savile Galleries consisted of two small, dark, stuffy rooms whose natural gloom was enhanced by heavy velvet drapes in wine-red and blackish green which were hung from ceiling to floor with the object of concealing the neutral office-building walls. There was also another and still smaller room which had no drapes and was therefore more cheerful, but this was merely the inner office where the stenographer and the Negro boy assistant were herded, together with the office supplies, the Social Register, and Poor’s Business Directory, and where the sitter for a miniature in progress was occasionally tied.

  For Mr. Sheer’s gallery was unique in one respect. On my first day there I had stared hopefully about at the shabby collection of priests’ robes, china figurines, clocks, bronzes, carved ivories, old silver, porcelains, and seen only the scrapings of the Fifty-ninth Street auction rooms. In a glass case off in one corner, there were a few garnet chokers, some earrings in wrought Italian silver, and an improbable-looking sapphire ring in an out-of-date claw setting. On the walls hung a couple of faded paintings of the Hudson River School and some gaudy scenes of Venice, which, as I learned later, had been signed by Mr. Sheer with any Italian name that happened to come into his head. (As he said, there was nothing really wrong with this practice of his: it made the customer feel better to see some name on a picture, and it was not, after all, as if he were attributing them to Raphael.) But that morning, knowing nothing of Mr. Sheer, I had looked about at all those tarnished objects (I had been led to expect something grander, more artistic, more “interesting”) and tears had come to my eyes as I wondered how I should describe this dreary job to my family and friends. It was then that I noticed the smell.

  “Dogs,” Mr. Sheer said. “Wear your dog on your sleeve.” I stared at him. He went into the inner office and came back with a jeweler’s box in which lay a pair of crystal cuff links. Buried in the crystals, one could see a tiny pair of scotties. “They’re real portraits,” he said. “We do them right here in the gallery. Something newer than monograms.” He held them up for me to look at. “Isn’t that a beautiful bit of workmanship?” he asked. His face lit up as he pronounced this sentence. “Look at that coat. You can see every hair.” The artist, he explained, was an elderly Frenchman who, before the War, had done all the Kaiser’s dogs in miniature, an achievement Mr. Sheer never failed to linger over in the sales letters he dictated. How much this meant to Mr. Sheer I did not understand until I suggested one day that we should omit the part about the Kaiser from a follow-up I was writing. It was the only time he was ever angry with me. I saw then that it was not solely Monsieur Ravasse’s talents that made Mr. Sheer treat him, alone of his associates, with a subservient respect, made him pay him, take his scoldings, ask his advice. Unquestionably, Monsieur Ravasse’s work did excite Mr. Sheer’s admiration—every pair of cuff links, every brooch was for him a new miracle—but the greater miracle had, I am afraid, taken place inside Mr. Sheer’s head: he had succumbed to the spell of his own salesmanship, and Monsieur Ravasse had become interchangeable with the Kaiser in his mind.

  At any rate, commercially speaking, Monsieur Ravasse was, virtually, our only asset, and it was these custom-made dog crystals that Mr. Sheer was pushing all that hot summer I worked for him. There was not a great margin of profit to be made on them, and many inconveniences attended their execution, but they were the only things we had that tempted the rich people, who, on Long Island, in New Jersey, in the Adirondacks, in Canada, were feeling themselves poor. In the letters I took from his dictation all our pieces were described as Extraordinary Bargains, Sacrifices, Exceptional Opportunities, Fine Investments Especially In These Times. But the rich people seldom believed. Mr. Sheer might insist that “an opportunity like this may never present itself again,” but only when a man’s own dog was concerned did the argument carry much weight. A seventeenth-century tapestry would still exist when times got better (if they ever did); one could afford to wait and pay a little more, if necessary. But one’s own dog might die, or the aging artist, who after all dated from Louis Napoleon, might die himself. So one might perhaps hurry, as Mr. Sheer urged, to-take-advantage-of-this-remarkable-offer.

  During that summer we turned out several Bedlingtons, a cairn, two Kerry blues, some German sheep dogs, and even a chihuahua, which, being itself a miniature, proved, in Mr. Sheer’s opinion, the least interesting of all our subjects. There were also extensive negotiations with a lady who had thirty-one toy spaniels, but she and Mr. Sheer could never get together on the price (for she felt that the number of dogs entitled her to a cut rate), and the project was finally abandoned.

  The do
gs who came up from Long Island or New Jersey presented no particular problems. They arrived with their handlers, posed for a few hours, and then went home until the next day. Naturally, the miniature would have to be repainted at least once, for the owners never felt that their pets had been done justice, but this was a relatively simple matter. It was the dogs who were not within commuting distance that gave us trouble. Such a dog would arrive by Railway Express, boxed up in a cage and wild with hunger. Arrangements would have been made, of course, for it to be fed by the trainmen on the way, but, as far as we could tell, this was never done. We would take the cage into the inner office, open it, and the animal would shoot out and bite me on the leg. There was one cairn who came out like a black cannonball and was crazy ever after. The dogs were usually in such bad condition that extensive treatment by a veterinary was necessary before we could allow them to pose. The cairn was never able to pose at all. We kept him in the office for a long time, trying to soothe him back to sanity, but it was no use, and when he finally bit Mr. Sheer’s red-haired mistress, we sent him home to his owner, who threatened to sue us for what had happened.

  Yet in spite of the havoc created by this business, the nervous strain and the expense, the smell and the smallness of the profit, there was nearly always a dog boarding in my office, eating the choicest dog meat while Mr. Sheer went without his lunch. As the summer wore on, the smell of the dogs mingled with the damp, sour odor of the old velvet drapes, with the colored boy’s personal smell, with the smell of Mr. Sheer’s two suits, which were stiff with dried sweat, until our very skins were soaked with the gallery, and even outside, on the streets, we walked about with a special, occupational scent.