The Company She Keeps

by Mary McCarthy

  Just as I was leaving, Mr. Sheer had an afterthought. I was to tell Bierman, he said, that if anything should go wrong, Mr. Sheer would make good because his mother had a diamond that was worth more than all of Bierman’s stones put together, and he would be glad to wire his mother in California to send this diamond for Bierman to hold as security.

  “But does your mother really have a diamond?” I asked, and indeed I was surprised to hear that Mr. Sheer really had a mother.

  “Of course,” he replied impatiently. But he never spoke of it again. Whether it was out of respect for Mr. Sheer’s mother or out of respect for Mr. Sheer’s imagination, I do not know, but neither Bierman nor I, whatever the provocation, was ever so tactless as to remind him of this promise.

  In a little office back of a jewelry store I told Bierman, a small, all-gray man, the story Mr. Sheer had prepared for me, including, at the end, the vision of the fabulous diamond in California. I did not expect him to believe me. But when I finished he seemed convinced. It was not so much that he believed in a literal sense what I was saying (he could hardly have been so naïve), but he appeared to trust what was behind what I was saying, the intention to make things right. It occurred to me after this episode that Mr. Sheer was fond of me and sometimes paid my salary, not, as I sometimes thought, out of snobbism because he believed me to be a lady, nor out of cultural aspiration because he believed me to be educated, but simply because I was the only one of his retinue who had an honest face.

  Already I had fobbed off the city marshal, now I had pacified Bierman, and it was not long before I was being sent on errands of the most dubious nature, leaving Mr. Sheer behind in the Savile Galleries, secure in his confidence that my good faith would not be questioned. After this, it was I who was sent to get credit from tradesmen, I who cashed checks, I who would walk down Madison Avenue with a clock under my arm, going from door to door of the jewelers in the attempt to sell it for cash. It was even I who in a dark room taken by the hour in a questionable hotel showed a tiny, eight-by-ten Rembrandt, which I now think must certainly have been stolen, to various rat-faced men who came by appointment to examine it, while Mr. Sheer in the closet waited for results.

  Of course, if I were to remain valuable to Mr. Sheer, I would have to believe that the checks were good, that the Rembrandt was genuine and legally acquired, that if the story I was telling Bierman were false, nevertheless the story that lay hidden behind it was true and not discreditable. And here lay Mr. Sheer’s dilemma: if he kept me in a state of innocence (which was difficult since I handled all his business), I might blunder on one of my errands and get him into trouble; but if he allowed me to be corrupted by knowledge of his affairs, I would lose that earnest sincerity that could never be properly simulated. The dilemma was insoluble, as he discovered later. Meanwhile, his brain was kept working overtime, for each of his deceptions had to be double-barreled, one set of lies for his creditors and one for me.

  Looking back, I see that, in the Bierman case, the Carew story was the lie intended for domestic consumption. Surely Carew must have been fictional, for when the finale of the diamond business took place, there was no Carew in it at all, and, in the years I have known Mr. Sheer since, I have never seen or heard of that playboy, as Mr. Sheer always called him, who figured so largely in my life that summer. Neither have I ever seen the name in Winchell’s column.

  I returned to the gallery from Bierman’s store, ready for action. The thing to do, I said, was to find Carew at once. Mr. Sheer, it seemed to me, had been strangely apathetic about looking for him. He had heard a rumor, he finally murmured, that the girl Carew was keeping had been seen in Atlantic City.

  “We must look for him in Atlantic City then,” I announced energetically. “What hotel do you think he would be staying at?”

  Mr. Sheer named a hotel and I called it by long distance. There was no Thomas Carew registered there. I called a second and a third, but there was still no Carew. Mr. Sheer began to find the search enlivening, and together we called all the hotels in Atlantic City, but it was quite fruitless. Then I remembered having read in detective stories that people who went to seaside resorts with girls would often register under false names but use their own initials so that the name on the register would match the luggage. I suggested that we try asking for anybody whose initials were “T. C.” Mr. Sheer was enthusiastic about the idea, and we called all the hotels over again, but either the clerks would not co-operate with us or the people we got on the wire were indignant when Mr. Sheer would open the conversation by asking if they were Tom Carew. Mr. Sheer was positive, however, that none of the men he talked to had Carew’s voice. We passed a whole afternoon this way, an afternoon we both enjoyed, I because I felt myself hot on the trail of the fugitive, like a particularly bright and wily bloodhound, and Mr. Sheer, no doubt, because he had a taste for practical jokes, and found this search for an imaginary Carew a pleasant diversion from his troubles.

  But his mood changed when I remarked that though we had not been able to find Carew, our idea was still good, and we might now try looking for the girl. What was her name, I asked. Mr. Sheer did not reply directly.

  “You know, Miss Sargent,” he said, getting up, “I’ve just been thinking that we’re wasting our time this way. The best thing to do is to get a detective on it. I think I’ll just run around and talk to O’Bannon. If Bierman calls tell him I’ll call him back in an hour.”

  He took up his hat, paused at the door as he always did to look up and down the corridor, and went on out.

  O’Bannon was a friend of Mr. Sheer’s, a private detective who was known in the trade for having a particularly choice collection of strikebreakers on call, but who had lately achieved a wider notoriety when he had been jailed for an attempt to burgle the district attorney’s safe during a political investigation. I had seen him once or twice waiting for Mr. Sheer, a short, thick-set man with flat feet who smoked a black cigar and wore his hat on the back of his head. With these salient occupational characteristics, he had intensified the sinister air of our outer room as he sat in a red velvet chair and stared pugnaciously at the glittering priests’ robes on the wall. (Mr. Sheer generally had a friend waiting for him in the outer room—there were a silver forger, a racetrack tout, a typewriter salesman, a men’s tailor, a professional gambler, and there was also, of course, Billie, Mr. Sheer’s red-haired mistress who drank. He would keep them there for hours while he talked to me in the office or made phone calls or “stepped out” on mysterious errands. When he was finally ready to see them he would come out and beckon them into the inner room with that hushed, ingratiating, yet faintly sadistic air that a dentist uses to summon his patients from the anteroom. At this time, however, O’Bannon, though fully qualified by his unprepossessing appearance, was not an habitué.)

  After this day, there was a lull during which O’Bannon was supposed to be looking for Carew. At length, Bierman began to call again, and soon Bierman was replaced by his lawyer, whose telephone manners were more suave but also more ominous. Still O’Bannon reported no success. I was growing frightened, and Mr. Sheer took on a hunted look; his nose stood out more sharply in his sunken face and his pale-green eyes burned with a desperate light. We stopped writing letters altogether and made no attempt to solicit business. I took to bringing a volume of Proust to the office with me, and Mr. Sheer passed the days listlessly reading the Social Register. But finally one morning Mr. Sheer brought the news that O’Bannon had got on the track of Carew’s girl. Carew himself, he said, had completely disappeared. The girl had the diamonds all right, but she demanded five hundred dollars before she would give them up. She and Carew had had a fight, Mr. Sheer said, and she maintained that Carew owed her money, and she was holding the diamonds as security.

  “But the diamonds don’t belong to her,” I exclaimed. “She will have to give them up.”

  Mr. Sheer shook his head sadly. “It’s just a hold-up,” he explained, with a certain worldly resignation.

&nb
sp; “I wouldn’t do it, Mr. Sheer,” I protested. “And where are you going to get the five hundred dollars?”

  For it seemed obvious to me that if Mr. Sheer had had anything salable he would already have sold it.

  “Well,” he said thoughtfully, “there’s that bronze.”

  “What bronze?”

  “Oh, you know, Custer’s Last Stand,” he answered impatiently.

  I had never heard anything of this bronze before, and it was a surprise to find Mr. Sheer dealing in Americana. His tastes in general were sumptuous and European, and while every other dealer of Mr. Sheer’s category would feature a portrait of Lincoln or a Revolutionary bedspread showing the Continental Congress, Mr. Sheer, for some reason, eschewed anything with a patriotic theme, and would even speak contemptuously of Paul Revere silver. But what I did not yet realize was that he would sell anything he could get his hands on. Now and then he would sell a live dog, and on the day I was displaying the Rembrandt in the hotel room, I was also empowered to offer an Isotta-Fraschini for a thousand dollars. And, of course, if he were telling the truth, he had been trying to sell Bierman’s diamonds.

  When the colored boy had gone out and returned with a huge bronze, showing one tall American with a gun and a cowboy hat standing on a hill, surrounded by some dervish-like Indians, I could see that the work had a certain sporting character that must have attracted Mr. Sheer. But I could not imagine that it would be readily marketable. I was mistaken.

  Mr. Sheer telephoned Caporello, the little white-faced Italian silver forger who spent his spare time in the outer room of our gallery.

  “What are you going to do?” I said. “It would take him quite a long time to forge a copy of this thing, and besides how do you know that he can work in bronze?”

  Mr. Sheer was displeased by this levity toward the bronze, which he was in the very act of admiring.

  “He told me once he thought he could sell it,” he replied shortly.

  When Caporello arrived, Mr. Sheer took him into the inner room, and after a time Caporello went away and then came back again, and the colored boy wrapped the bronze in brown paper and took it down in the elevator and put it in a taxi with Caporello, who drove off and was not seen again for three days.

  “He’s lit out for Italy, it’s a sure thing,” Mr. Sheer would say, pacing gloomily up and down the gallery. And each time he said this we would both laugh. For Mr. Sheer had a kind of calamitous humor, which when his mishaps seemed to take on an artistic shape or unity, he would turn wryly on himself. Death was always comic for him, and even while he was telling you that so-and-so’s end was “a terrible thing,” you could see the tension with which his face was held grave and almost hear the laughter bubbling underneath. He told me once of the death of his closest friend. “He was drunk,” he said, “and dived in a swimming pool [pause, and then the explosion of laughter], but there was no water in it.” Next, with a quick recovery of sobriety, “Oh, Miss Sargent, it was a terrible thing. He broke his neck.” Another time, several years later, I came to see him in his office and found him convulsed with merriment. “You know what happened?” he said. “My best customer just dropped dead.” One of his most hilarious anecdotes concerned the death of an old man, a wealthy soap manufacturer (“Miss Sargent, he was like an uncle to me”), who met his end in a Broadway hotel, signing checks for the entire floor show of the Rainbow Restaurant, twenty or thirty strapping blondes who crowded around the deathbed, guiding the fountain pen in his failing hand.

  Our doleful laughter finally penetrated to the corner where Elmer, the colored boy, had been sitting for days, brooding about his unpaid salary and a pair of field glasses that he wanted to buy for his R.O.T.C. work.

  “Mr. Sheer,” he murmured, “are you worried about this Caporello? I never did trust him myself, so when I put the bronze in the cab with him I took the driver’s number.” The atmosphere of the detective story had infected us all.

  Mr. Sheer was extremely proud of this quick-wittedness on Elmer’s part. “He’s a smart nigger,” he said. He even paid the boy his salary that Saturday, but was indignant when he learned that Elmer had used it to buy the field glasses, and so he did not pay him again for a long time. “That nigger played on my sympathies,” he said. “I thought I was contributing to the support of his poor old mother who does laundry.”

  The cab driver, whom we reached without difficulty, had been struck by the size of Custer’s Last Stand, and recalled at once that he had taken Caporello to Tympany’s. We telephoned Tympany’s and found that the little Italian had sold them the bronze, but was not to receive the check until the following day. Mr. Sheer could just as well have intervened himself, but he wanted, he said, “to have some fun with Caporello,” so he sent O’Bannon around to Tympany’s to nab Caporello as he came out with the money. The little man was trembling like a drug addict when he arrived, under escort, at the gallery door. He took his hundred dollars’ commission and scurried gratefully away, while Mr. Sheer and O’Bannon leaned back on the sofa and had a good laugh.

  Now that he had the money, it should have been simple enough to see the girl and get the diamonds. But, frightened and harried as he was, Mr. Sheer still shrank from the direct approach. In the first place, he said, O’Bannon would have to go along, and, in the second place, we would have to get someone to impersonate the owner of the diamonds. But why, I demanded. “You don’t understand how to handle these things,” he replied. He at length decided that his lady friend, Billie, who was a plump, pasty, semi-genteel matron, would be suitable for the part, and he spent the afternoon rehearsing her in the inner room. It was arranged that the three of them, O’Bannon, Billie, and Mr. Sheer, should confront the girl in her apartment the next morning.

  It was almost over. My sense of relief was so great that I bought Billie two cocktails before going to dinner.

  But once again, as in the case of Caporello, the human element in the plot he had constructed nearly betrayed Mr. Sheer. At nine-fifteen O’Bannon telephoned that he was sick in Flatbush and would not consider coming to town. Mr. Sheer went out to look for another detective, and the lawyer telephoned to say that he would be at police court at two in the afternoon, swearing out the warrant for Mr. Sheer’s arrest. “Without fail,” he added with satirical emphasis. Mr. Sheer came back at last with a tall, iron-gray detective who kept asserting that he knew the girl from the Starr Faithful case, and a Negro detective who said nothing but eyed Elmer with steady suspicion. It was at this point we realized that Billie too had failed to appear. The colored detective finally found her, still drunk, in the apartment of an aviator. While we were waiting I told Mr. Sheer about the two cocktails. “It’s too bad, Miss Sargent, but you couldn’t have known it,” he said, mournfully. “She’s been on the wagon for two months and she’s a perfect lady when she’s sober.” At one o’clock I saw them all into a taxi, Billie wobbling, her eyes glazed, leaning on the arm of the colored man and trying to repeat her lines, Mr. Sheer admonishing her to try to forget them. “Don’t open your mouth, Billie,” he was saying. “When we get there, just grab a chair and sit down.”

  Bierman’s lawyer was on his way downtown when they strong-armed their way into an apartment in the Fifties, and found a small, snub-nosed blonde in a maraboued negligee huddled on her bed. The girl began to scream, protesting that she had changed her mind, that five hundred dollars was not enough, that she had never seen Mr. Sheer before. The Negro detective picked her up and slung her over his shoulder, announcing that he was taking her to the Fifty-second Street police station. Billie passed out in her chair. The girl began to struggle, and the negligee slipped off first one shoulder and then the other, and finally fell to the floor. At a sign from the gray-haired man the Negro released her, Mr. Sheer produced the money, and the girl, stark-naked and sobbing, dove under her bed, where about a dozen pairs o£ shoes lay scattered on the dusty floor. She scrabbled about among them, like a little pug dog, Mr. Sheer said, and began to pull stockings out of the shoes,
wildly, at random. With the stockings came a quantity of diamonds, rings, bracelets, pins, and clips. The spectacle so unnerved Mr. Sheer that he could not remember at first which stones were Bierman’s. Hazily he selected a few, the Negro detective picked up Billie, who could no longer walk, and they went out, leaving the girl, still weeping, crouched on the floor in the attitude of a Hindu worshiper, before the little pile of diamonds.

  “I was so rattled,” Mr. Sheer said afterwards, “that it didn’t occur to me till we left the building that I should have claimed the whole outfit.”

  He smiled ruefully, and shook his head.

  One morning about a month later a short man with a broken nose came into the gallery.

  I had nearly forgotten about the Bierman affair. For a few days after Mr. Sheer had delivered the diamonds, we had discussed it as if it were a party we had gone to. But then a neurotic schnauzer had arrived from the West, and we were back in the dog-crystal business. And when the case was finished, it was utterly finished. We never saw or heard of any of the people again. Mr. Sheer could shut off sections of his life, as a submarine can shut off compartments, and still survive. The effect was so startling as to make you believe that the sections had never been real in the first place, that not only was there no Carew, but there was no girl, there were no diamonds. But this is impossible.

  I preferred at the time not to delve into Mr. Sheer’s version of the story, but to believe that he had somehow, unintentionally, got himself into a terrible quandary, and that, with my help, he had extricated himself honorably and would never lapse again. All my efforts were bent on keeping Mr. Sheer in a state of grace, and I stood guard over him as fiercely, as protectively and nervously, as if he had been a reformed drunkard. And, like the drunkard’s wife, I exuded optimism and respectability.