The Company She Keeps

by Mary McCarthy

  We were not making money. In spite of the commissioned crystals we were not so much as breaking even. The second morning I came to work I was met by a square man with a badge who was putting a sign on the door. The sign read, PUBLIC AUCTION TODAY.

  I took out my key and said politely, “I didn’t know there was to be an auction.”

  “Really?” said the man. “Maybe you want to pay this forty-three eighty-five then?” And he shoved a document at me.

  “You mean,” I said, “it’s a debt?”

  “Don’t kid me, sister,” said the man, “I’m the city marshal.”

  I began to talk very rapidly, to say that I was sure Mr. Sheer didn’t know about this, that it must be an oversight, that he would be here any minute, that the marshal must wait till he came. But another man came up the hall and began to help him with the sign, and the city marshal’s only replies were derisive and they were addressed, not to me, but to his assistant, who found them very amusing. I went into my office, put my head on the typewriter, and started to cry.

  At once the city marshal was bending over me, his hand on my shoulder.

  “For God’s sake, sister, don’t cry,” he said. “What’s the trouble? This guy your sweetheart?”

  “No,” I sobbed.

  “He a relation of yours?”

  “No.”

  “Then for God’s sake what are you crying about?”

  “Because I’m not accustomed to being spoken to in such a manner.”

  He dropped his hand in amazement. Then he went out and took the sign down.

  “You think this guy will pay up?”

  “Yes.”

  “All right. See that he has the money at my office at four o’clock sharp.”

  The two of them went away, carrying the sign.

  Mr. Sheer slipped in at noon with an apprehensive air. I expected him to share my indignation at the law’s highhandedness, but he seemed, rather, to take the city marshal’s attitude. He listened to my story with some astonishment, and then laughed in a relieved way, and shook my hand several times and said I was going to make a wonderful secretary.

  “But you must pay the money right away,” I said.

  “Yes,” he answered vaguely.

  However, I nagged him about it until he made some phone calls, in the inner office, with the door closed. He then went out, and the city marshal never came again, so, presumably, the debt was paid.

  In conversation Mr. Sheer frequently reverted to the city marshal’s visit. In his eyes, one could see, it marked a turning-point in his career. Obviously, as I recognized later, he had been expecting the city marshal and his sign, had tried in all quarters to raise the money and failed. That was why he had not come in until noon, for in the face of danger Mr. Sheer always disappeared. He had resigned himself to the loss of his business and the concomitant loss of prestige. He had seen himself condemned, cast back into the outer darkness from which he had risen, back into that nether world where a public auction or a bankruptcy or a jail term carried no stigma. He had already accepted his sentence when he discovered that he had been reprieved, as if by a miracle, at the eleventh hour. He had been given, as it were, a second chance, and with it came a second wind that enabled him to effect, easily, by a few telephone calls, what for weeks had been the impossible—the settlement of a debt of forty-three dollars and some odd cents. After this, Mr. Sheer’s hold on respectability was much more tenacious, for after this Mr. Sheer no longer believed that his clutching fingers could be shaken off.

  However unappetizing, however eccentric his gallery might appear to the sophisticated world, to Mr. Sheer these rooms with their dark velvet, their porcelain urns, their statuary, their dirty chasubles hung from the ceiling, their little rococo chairs, and their deep, velvet-covered sofa incarnated a double dream. From his Western boyhood, he said, he had loved dogs and culture. There was a rich man back in San Francisco whose dogs he had valeted and whose lawn he had watered; now and then he had been allowed to look at this man’s fine library, which contained, he declared with reminiscent awe, “all these wonderful works on Shakespeare and vice versa.” Today, as at that time, the dog was the natural highway to culture, and Mr. Sheer perceived no incongruity between the tarnished luxury of his setting and the homeliness of his liveliest line of goods.

  He had begun as a bootlegger shortly after Prohibition had come in. He had perhaps been jailed (his accounts of his past were always vague and contradictory), but at any rate he had left the liquor business to become a veterinary’s assistant. After a short period as a prize fighter’s handler, he had bought himself a small kennels, and he had but recently progressed from selling dogs to selling their miniatures. He had met Monsieur Ravasse at his kennels one day, and had been inspired by him to open a novelty jewelry business in which the crystals played a leading part. His imagination, however, had been kindled less by the stones he dealt in than by the clocks, the carved ivories, the church vessels, the china mantel ornaments—all the rich and bizarre oddities that clutter the fringe of the jewelry trade; and it had not been long before I. F. Sheer, Jeweler had melted into The Savile Galleries. His gallery was the least rewarding of all his ventures, but it was dearer to him than any. Having pursued the luxury trades with considerable single-mindedness, he had now arrived at a point where the Right People, who had almost all his life been his customers, were now to become his clients—if he could only persuade them to buy.

  For if Mr. Sheer loved culture, he loved Money too, and he could not always keep them apart in his mind (it was a rich man that had owned that library). Indeed it was sometimes difficult to tell whether he loved culture simply as an appurtenance of wealth or whether he loved it genuinely, for its own sake. He was fond of the fine arts, fond of long words, and fond of me, but was this simply because he felt that between us we could make a prosperous gentleman out of him? I am not sure. He could never use the long words correctly and he could hardly tell a Cellini from a Remington; yet surely there was a kind of integrity in that very lack of taste.

  He was really proud of his stock; he admired everything indiscriminately. If he had nothing else to do, he would walk about the gallery, studying the pieces. When he could no longer contain himself he would summon me from my desk and point to a canal or to a bit of foliage in a picture and exclaim, “Isn’t that a wonderful piece of painting?” Or of a vase, “Come here, Miss Sargent, and look at that glaze.” It was all wonderful to him.

  He worshipped any kind of ingenuity: boxes with false bottoms, cuckoo clocks, oval miniatures of the school of Boucher that opened if you pressed a button and disclosed a pornographic scene. He liked little statues that became fountains, Victorian banks made to resemble birds’ nests, where the bird grasped the coin in its beak and dropped it when the lever was pulled. And for him the supreme ingenuity was the great trompe l’oeil of art itself, which made a painted canal look exactly like a real one and a bronze statue simulate a man. He had no use for modern art or modern design (although he knew them to be fashionable); it puzzled and annoyed him that anyone should, for example, make a set of book-ends that looked, simply, like themselves. The whole conception of functionalism was odious to him, for since art was in his eyes a splendid confidence game, the craftsman who did not, in some fashion, deceive his public seemed to him a sort of stool-pigeon, a high-class rat.

  The colored boy who worked for us had far more taste, and he and I, in the little inner office, formed a Connoisseurs’ League to pass on the new objects as they came in. But such distinctions, whether they came from me, from the colored boy, from another dealer, or from a customer, only angered Mr. Sheer. They smacked of disloyalty, not only to Mr. Sheer’s business, but to art itself. And they seemed to him unnatural: he always suspected a hidden motive. Another dealer was plainly trying to run down Mr. Sheer’s business for competitive reasons; the colored boy was making himself disagreeable because his salary had not been paid; the customer had a prejudice against the genre in question; and I was a
college girl whose head had been stuffed with faddish preferences for modern design.

  It is possible that it was merely the pride of ownership that was coloring Mr. Sheer’s vision: his objects, being all extensions of his own personality, were all therefore equal in his heart. Certainly, I have often, walking down Fifty-seventh Street with him, seen a tapestry that was, to me, indistinguishable from one in Mr. Sheer’s possession, and heard him, pausing, compare it unfavorably to his own. But there was always a certain fretfulness in his voice which came from the fact that he really felt the other tapestry to be quite as wonderful as his.

  In any case, if the pride of ownership was working in Mr. Sheer, that pride was, characteristically, unreal, since the ownership was factitious. Mr. Sheer did not, I discovered, own a single one of the objects he displayed; indeed, so far as the ornamental arts were concerned, he had never owned anything more than a tie-pin in his life.

  His gallery was stocked with loans from other dealers, merchandise that he held “on consignment.” Some of it had been freely offered: another dealer who happened to have an unfashionable marble on his hands, a trade-in, say, that he despaired of selling to his own clients, would promise Mr. Sheer a commission to dispose of it. Others had been more artfully extracted. Mr. Sheer, hearing of a fine jade that was owned by someone else, would pretend to have a client who was interested in just such a piece. The other dealer would yield up the jade, and Mr. Sheer would promptly display it in his gallery. He would then have to stall off the owner with a variety of excuses until a real client could be found to take the place of the imaginary one. If no real client materialized, the jade would eventually have to be returned, but a long time usually elapsed before Mr. Sheer would admit defeat. In these ways, Mr. Sheer kept his gallery well populated with objects. That excessive secrecy and cunning, so characteristic of the trade, played directly into his hands. Each dealer assumed that he was the only one using the Savile Galleries as an outlet. There would have been considerable astonishment in Fifty-ninth Street circles had the dealers learned that they had unwittingly formed a combination to provide Mr. Sheer with what was really the capital for a rival gallery.

  As for Mr. Sheer himself, he was careful to wrap all his affairs in such a cocoon of falsehoods that, of all the people associated with him, only the colored boy, whose job it was to call for and deliver merchandise, had any suspicion of the truth. Like all my own discoveries about Mr. Sheer, this one was made painfully and by accident. He was not given to confession, and any unsolicited information he advanced about himself was likely to be either unimportant or false. In general, his aversion to truth-telling was fanatical—to tell the truth, at any time, on any matter, to any hearer, was, he believed, profoundly dangerous: any fact, however small, however harmless, provided it was a fact, was better concealed: facts were high explosives. Never, for example, during the time I worked for him, did I learn where he lived. He would disappear at night and return in the morning. If he were late, customers and creditors would have to wait for him; there was no way, I was continually explaining, of reaching him by phone. Since those days, I have often badgered him about this question, and he has told me a number of different stories. He has said that he was living with a woman, which I suspected, that he was passing back and forth between dollar-a-night hotels and flophouses, and was ashamed to tell me, which is possible, that he was sleeping on the divan in the gallery, which I know to be true, for one morning when he had overslept I found him there, in a rumpled pair of shorts, his close-curling hair damp with summer-morning sweat. Yet these explanations, taken separately or together, do not satisfy me. They may one or all be true, but there must have been something more.

  All during what I now think of as the dime-novel period of my employment with Mr. Sheer, I had no idea of the facts about the gallery. I did not find out until the very end. Had I been able to shake off the idea that Mr. Sheer was an ordinary businessman who was a little bit hard up, I might have been in a better position to understand what was going on.

  The thing began with a series of telephone calls from a man named Bierman, to whom Mr. Sheer was always out, but for whom a message was regularly left, a message so full of consideration and empty of meaning that it was clear that Bierman was a special case, a creditor perhaps, but no run-of-the-mill creditor.

  “Tell him I’ll call him back in an hour,” Mr. Sheer invariably whispered, or if he were stepping out, as he called it, for a few minutes, he would not fail to remind me, “If Bierman calls, tell him I’ll call him back in an hour.” Since Mr. Sheer never did call Bierman back, and since, as the days passed, the frequency of Bierman’s calls increased until they were coming at fifteen-minute intervals, I protested against having to repeat this farcical sentence, and begged Mr. Sheer to change the message, to suppress it altogether, or to speak to Bierman, who was getting very angry. But Mr. Sheer refused. The sentence, in his eyes, was a mark of civility to Bierman. To leave no message would be the equivalent of cutting him on the street. The sentence, moreover, had, for him, a kind of magic that I did not understand until I had had a longer experience of Mr. Sheer and his promises. Mr. Sheer’s promises were a kind of fiat money issued at will and with no regard to fulfillment, or, indeed, to plausibility. He differed from the ordinary debtor who, under pressure, offers a promise as a substitute for cash, in that the ordinary debtor is not deceived by the substitute, but expects the creditor to be, while Mr. Sheer was himself deceived and concerned himself hardly at all with what the creditor might think. And it was not only to creditors that Mr. Sheer extended his gilded pledges. He showered them about him like an obstinate philanthropist. He knew where he could get me an ermine wrap for practically nothing (I had nowhere to wear it). He knew a man that would place Elmer, the colored boy, in the Cotton Club floor show (Elmer was a serious-minded youth who did not dance). Objectively, none of the promises had any validity. Their usefulness was of a different sort. They acted as a kind of transmission belt to the real world from the world of Mr. Sheer’s fancy, the powerhouse of dreams that kept his life’s wheels turning. So this sentence which I kept passing on reassured Mr. Sheer in the same measure that it infuriated Bierman.

  When the man commenced to shout at me on the phone and, what was worse from Mr. Sheer’s point of view, to mention a lawyer, Mr. Sheer reluctantly abandoned that particular magic. Instead, he drew me into the dark inner room, seated me on the velvet couch, and announced with an appealingly gloomy air that he was going to take me into his confidence. Bierman was a jeweler, he said, and it was a question of diamonds. The story branched out and became more elaborate, and on subsequent days he gave me different versions of it, but this was all I was ever certain of: Bierman was a jeweler and it was a question of diamonds.

  I know this because very early in the game I talked to Bierman himself in his office.

  Even here perhaps I am too cocksure, for I remember, uncomfortably, a scheme by which Mr. Sheer at a later date staved off a creditor. He had borrowed a hunting bronze featuring some falcons from a lady art dealer, and had got Abernethie and Rich to display it in a window full of hunting equipment. Through them, he had sold it to one of the Long Island sporting people. When Mrs. Martino, the dealer, wanted her money, it had already been parceled out to the landlord, the stationer, the photographer, and the telephone company. It was true, Mr. Sheer informed her, that he had sold the picture, but he had not yet been paid. This held Mrs. Martino at bay for some months, but at the end of that time, she began to make herself unpleasant, and Mr. Sheer saw that it was time to act. He went around to Abernethie’s and asked for the loan of one of their offices “to talk to a client in.” They gave him an office marked VICE-PRESIDENT. He arranged to have Mrs. Martino meet him there, and arrived himself a little ahead of time, accompanied by an old vaudeville actor he knew. The vaudevillian hid his hat and sat down behind the desk. When Mrs. Martino was shown in, the man was introduced by Mr. Sheer as Mr. Brown of Abernethie’s. The vaudevillian then explained to her
in a Keith-time version of a fox-hunting dialect that the bronze had indeed been sold “to an old and valued client,” who “settled his accounts” only once a year, “the English system, you know; we can’t hurry a man like that. Mrs. Martino, who was Spanish, was powerfully impressed, and it was six months before she went back to Abernethie’s to question Mr. Brown again. Then Mr. Sheer was obliged to pay up instantly, but the next day he borrowed back half the money from Mrs. Martino’s husband.

  Bierman must have been real, however, for in the interview Mr. Sheer projected it was I who was to pretend to be someone else.

  He had borrowed some diamonds from Bierman, he said, to show to a friend, a playboy named Carew. But Carew, who was considering buying them for a chorus girl he was keeping, had disappeared with the diamonds before coming to any decision. It was a criminal offense to let jewelry that you had taken on consignment go out of your possession, so Bierman would have to be kept from legal action until Carew could be found. Now supposing I were to go to Bierman and say that I was a rich widow who had bought the diamonds from Mr. Sheer but would be unable to pay until my next dividend fell due….

  “But what if he should ask to see them?” I said.

  “Tell him you sent them home to Pittsburgh to have them reset.”

  “But I don’t look like a rich widow—”

  “You married young,” said Mr. Sheer. “Do you want me to go to Sing Sing?”

  In the end I persuaded him that my impersonation of this character would only evoke catcalls from Bierman. But I would go to him in my own person, I said, tell him the truth, and beg him to wait a little. I could go, Mr. Sheer finally conceded, if I promised not to mention Carew. I should merely say that the stones had been sent out for resetting and there had been an unavoidable delay.