The Company She Keeps

by Mary McCarthy

  This particular morning Mr. Sheer was out, but the broken nose and the checked suit the visitor was wearing told me at once that he was not a customer but a friend of Mr. Sheer’s. He spoke cordially to Elmer, looked appreciatively at all the things, and asked after business. Business was all right, I said, and my character of the cheerful secretary compelled me to add, “Mr. Sheer has sold quite a few things lately!”

  “Yes? I’m in the dog business myself, have been since I left the ring. People aren’t buying dogs, so I’m surprised to hear that they’re buying anything.”

  There was an unanswerable skepticism in the man’s tone, and I silently began to type a letter. I could hear him walking inquisitively about.

  “Say, you don’t remember a bronze he used to have? A big thing, Custer’s Last Stand, what became of it?”

  Elmer coughed violently in the corner.

  “Oh,” I said, happy to find myself on safe ground, “he sold that a long time ago.”

  “That’s fine. I hope he got a good price for it.”

  “Pretty good,” I admitted.

  He left almost at once, telling me to have Mr. Sheer call him. I was proceeding with the form letter I was typing (“I want you to be among the first to see a tapestry I have just received from abroad. I enclose a photograph, which, of course, can only give you the barest notion of the beauty of the original. This remarkable medieval subject” …), when Elmer’s voice came weakly from the corner.

  “Miss Sargent, I think I better tell you. That man is the owner of that bronze.”

  My hands dropped from the keys.

  “You mean that Mr. Sheer sold it and then didn’t tell him?”

  Elmer nodded.

  “It’s too bad,” he said, “it had to be him. He used to be the welterweight contender.”

  When he heard the news, Mr. Sheer did not rebuke me. It was bound to happen, he said. But he would have to pay up instantly, and pay not the six hundred dollars he had received for it but eight, which was the value the welterweight contender had originally set on his art treasure.

  “Elmer thinks he’s going to beat you up,” I said.

  “No,” said Mr. Sheer, and a ruminative smile lit up his pale, sharp face. “You know, Miss Sargent, it’s a funny thing, with all the crooked things I’ve done nobody’s ever taken a sock at me. Why do you suppose that is?”

  “I don’t know, Mr. Sheer,” I said sadly.

  The word was out at last. I was gratified in a way that Mr. Sheer had admitted the truth, but depressed by the casual, accidental manner in which it had slipped out, as if that “crooked” were taken for granted by Mr. Sheer, accepted by him as an unalterable part of his personality. My vision of a reformed, transfigured Mr. Sheer began reluctantly to dissolve, as I perceived that there was no possibility of reform because there was no practical basis for it, because, in other words (and now I knew it), there was no merchandise. I saw the nub of Mr. Sheer’s business tragedy: he was continually being forced, by the impatience of a creditor, to sell somebody else’s property below cost. In order to make good in the Bierman case he had had to sell an eight-hundred-dollar bronze for six hundred, and to make good for the bronze he would have to sell a thousand-dollar tapestry for eight hundred, and to make good for that he would have to sell a twelve-hundred-dollar chalice for a thousand, and so on—in short, every time he sold a picture he not only ran the risk of a jail sentence, but he lost money. Of course, in reality, it was not Mr. Sheer who lost money (since he had none to lose); it was always the last creditor who was the potential loser, and if that chain of debt were ever to break, it would be the ultimate creditor who would have to bear the accumulated losses. Mr. Sheer did not allow himself to imagine that the chain could break; rather, he looked forward to a time when by a Big Sale he would loosen it voluntarily; meanwhile he clung to it as a lifebelt. “If I can only keep two jumps ahead of the sheriff, I’ll be all right,” he said.

  But I could not make myself believe in the Big Sale, and the sheriff, it seemed to me, was gaining. The landlord, the telephone company, the stationers were pressing in; Elmer had not been paid and he looked sullen and hungry. We had a gallery full of objects that nobody wanted, and that, in any case, it would be criminal to sell. Billie was drunk and telephoning every fifteen minutes, threatening to commit suicide. Mr. Sheer’s jocular brutality (“Go ahead, Billie, I’m glad to hear it; I’ll give you a fine funeral”) reminded me of something I had been trying to forget, the picture of a little, white, pug-nosed chorus girl weeping and struggling in the Negro detective’s grip. The day was hot, the dog’s cage needed cleaning, and I thought that perhaps I had better quit.

  But how was Mr. Sheer going to get the eight hundred dollars to pay for the bronze? I would see him through this difficulty, I resolved, and then go.

  He was walking up and down in front of a very large Japanese silk screen which showed a deer hunt in progress. It had started out in life as a hanging and had been cut up into panels by Mr. Sheer himself, so that, as he said, it would not take up so much space. In spite of this mutilation, it was probably the most authentic thing we had, and all summer we had been asking twelve hundred dollars for it.

  “If I marked that down to eight,” he said in a meditative tone, “Mrs. La Plante would jump at it.”

  Mrs. La Plante was the lady with the toy spaniels, the widow of a theater operator, who always looked as if she were going through the customs. She dearly loved a bargain, and various merchants had so overstocked her with possessions that she wore a dozen rings, strung five or six necklaces around her neck, pinned odd bits of priceless lace at her bosom and wrists, and carried two fur stoles even on the hottest summer days. Mr. Sheer could have sold her everything in the gallery, if he had put his mind to it, sold her the things and then kept them on display, since previous purchases had left not an inch of free space in her house, and whenever she made an acquisition nowadays she simply left it with the dealer, dropping in from time to time to enjoy its beauties.

  In fact, this fat old lady was the perfect customer. She was passionately hospitable with her comfortable house in Long Beach, where there was plenty to eat, plenty to drink, and a swimming pool to cool off in. Early in the summer Mr. Sheer had spent several week ends there, and it was then that those abortive negotiations for the toy spaniel crystal necklace had taken place. But all at once he had stopped going, and, though Mrs. La Plante would telephone repeatedly, he would always refuse, with a hungry nostalgia in his eyes.

  At first I regarded his behavior as perverse, and used to remonstrate with him about it. Mrs. La Plante was just a bargain hunter, he would answer; a dealer had to cheat himself every time he sold her anything. I would conjure up the free meals, the drinks, and he would reply that Mrs. La Plante had too many people on the place. Naturally, Mrs. La Plante was such a Very Good Thing that Mr. Sheer was not the first nor the last to get wind of her, and it was true, as I began to notice, that Mr. Sheer was shy. He avoided strangers, particularly in large groups, and the volume of our correspondence testified to the fact that he would rather tackle a customer by mail, though this was a notoriously ineffective sales approach, than by telephone or in person. He found it still more comfortable to communicate with a customer through a letter written by someone else; in that way Mr. Sheer hardly figured in the deal at all. It was because I composed the letters that Mr. Sheer considered me invaluable as a stenographer; before my day he used to persuade a couple of elderly Country Life journalists to dictate descriptions of the new items to the girl in the office, descriptions which, as I discovered from the files, had had an odd sporting flavor. “This is a champion,” a letter would announce of a fine faïence vase.

  Nevertheless, I could not believe that it was the fear of meeting all the other gentlemen of the luxury trades that kept Mr. Sheer away from Mrs. La Plante’s. Perhaps there had been some question of quid pro quo, and he had defended himself as stoutly as Hippolytus.

  There was certainly something stoical about
his face, as, accepting the loan of the train fare from me, he set out that week end for Long Beach.

  He returned on Monday morning, hollow-eyed. Two well-dressed young men with excellent manners escorted him into the gallery. “This is Fred, Miss Sargent, and this is Ernest,” he said. “They drove me in.” In some indefinable way they seemed like a bodyguard.

  “She bought the screen,” he announced when we were alone, “but, Miss Sargent, I’ll never do it again. I didn’t get a wink of sleep.”

  I did not answer. I knew that what Mr. Sheer had done was absolutely necessary, yet I found myself unable to stifle my distaste.

  “Oh, Miss Sargent, it was terrible,” he said, and took a long breath.

  “You don’t have to tell me about it,” I said angrily.

  “You mean you could see it?” he asked.

  “See what?”

  “About the boys …”

  Mrs. La Plante, Mr. Sheer explained, had lately been monopolized by three young men—a dress designer, a decorator, and a real-estate operator—who were exploiting the old lady far more systematically than any previous parasites had done. It was the decorator and the real-estate man I had just met. No one before had ever been able to tolerate more than a week end at a time of Mrs. La Plante’s conversation, but the three young men were now living on the premises, doing needlework, knitting, and playing with the toy spaniels. They were not gigolos in the ordinary sense; they were just good company. To Mrs. La Plante they were her dear boys, and they in turn were fiercely possessive about the old lady, so possessive that they made a week-end visit a nightmare for an outsider. A jeweler had found a garter snake in his bed; a furrier had got a Mickey Finn; Mr. Sheer had been ducked, wearing one of his two suits, in the swimming pool—and Mrs. La Plante had been in a continuous spasm of merriment. “The boys make me young again,” she told Mr. Sheer. One by one, the ordinary merchants had dropped off. Mr. Sheer had hung on for a while, but even he could not sustain it. “They’re so petty and malicious, Miss Sargent,” he complained. “It broke my heart to see the way they were milking that innocent old lady.” When the boys had begun to demand commissions on any purchases Mrs. La Plante made, Mr. Sheer had given up.

  This week end Mr. Sheer had been subjected to a more advanced form of torture. The house was bulging with the boys and their friends, with the result that Mr. Sheer had had to share a room with Fred, the decorator.

  “In the same bed?” I asked.

  Mr. Sheer nodded mournfully. “I was afraid to go to sleep.”

  For two nights he had lain tense and watchful while the decorator tossed restlessly from side to side. In the morning, just as Mr. Sheer was dropping off, the young man had let all thirty-one toy spaniels into the room. They had jumped on the bed, and both days Mr. Sheer had waked up screaming. Mrs. La Plante had come out in a fur-trimmed dressing-gown and asked him if he had a guilty conscience.

  “I’ll never do it again,” he repeated, and that afternoon he took a nap on the velvet sofa in the inner room.

  But perhaps, after all, Mrs. La Plante was lonely with only the boys for company. At any rate, a few days later, she telephoned Mr. Sheer with a new project for having the toy spaniels pose in groups. With the bait dangling before him, Mr. Sheer’s resolution wilted. He went out to Long Beach for the night. Then he went out for two week ends in succession. The house was just as crowded; Mr. Sheer’s offers to sleep on the couch in the living room were politely brushed aside; so that after each visit Mr. Sheer would have to spend several afternoons napping on our musty sofa. It did not make any difference, though, for during this period, with the exception of Mrs. La Plante, we had no customers.

  It was so hot indeed that even Mr. Sheer’s creditors slackened in their attentions. Having nothing else to do, Mr. Sheer let his mind play on the problem of the boys. It no longer appeared to him insuperable. His first idea was to make friends with them. They were not necessarily, he said, a closed corporation. Two weeks before he had dismissed them as nauseating creatures; now he took a more tolerant attitude. After all, they could not help it if they were born that way, he said. The effect of the friendship offensive he instantly launched was to demoralize the office. The boys overran the gallery, criticizing the objects, making long-distance calls to their entire acquaintance on the Atlantic seaboard, and harrowing the colored boy with indecent proposals. They had to be taken out to lunch whenever they were in town, and they insisted on either Maillard’s or Schrafft’s. Finally the little decorator, Mr. Sheer’s bedfellow, stole five dollars out of my purse, and I offered Mr. Sheer his choice: them or me. Mr. Sheer advised me absently not to be petty, but he began to relax his attentions to the boys, for it was plain, whatever my feelings, that the friendship offensive was not working out. The boys were using their familiarity with Mr. Sheer’s affairs to manufacture new and factually documented slanders for Mrs. La Plante’s ears. A short acquaintance with Caporello, who was timidly coming around again, inspired them to say that Mr. Sheer was a silver forger and all his pieces were copies. (So far as I know, this was not true. Certainly many of his attributions were imaginative. He would walk up and down in front of a Japanese lacquer box for a long time, with narrowed eyes, communing with it, and finally he would let a light break on his face and exclaim, perhaps for my benefit, perhaps simply for his own, “Why, that must belong to the Heian period!” From that time on, the box would be dated. But this generous exercise of the critical faculty had little in common with Caporello’s artisanship. He would have nothing to do with the modern copies of Queen Anne silver that the Italian brought around from time to time—coffee pots or tankards with the old hallmark skillfully welded on. “You can say what you want, Miss Sargent,” he told me once, “but I’d never stoop that low.” Apparently, there was some borderline, imperceptible to the normal moral eye, which he would have felt it degrading to cross; and I had hurt his feelings more than once before I learned to watch for it.)

  At any rate, the more friendly Mr. Sheer became with the boys, the more chilly Mrs. La Plante’s manner grew. Mr. Sheer thought it over. He would take a leaf out of their book, he decided, and expose the boys to Mrs. La Plante. He got hold of a night-club proprietor, a former theatrical associate of the dead Mr. La Plante, and primed him to visit Mrs. La Plante and make her the following speech. “Mrs. La Plante, it has come to my ears that you are associating with Fred So-and-So, Ernest So-and-So, and another of their ilk. Mrs. La Plante, I could hardly believe it to be true when my good friend, Mr. Sheer, informed me of the fact. Mr. Sheer, of course, is an unworldly man, and he knew nothing against the boys. He told me of your friendship merely as a matter of interest. But I myself am a worldly man. I have heard of these men, and I tell you, Mrs. La Plante, Peter La Plante would turn over in his grave if he knew of this. Why, Mrs. La Plante, those men are degenerates, those men are homosexuals!”

  The night-club proprietor did go out to Long Beach and faithfully delivered the warning. Unfortunately, the whole thing fell extraordinarily flat owing to the fact that Mrs. La Plante did not know what a homosexual was, and, as the night-club man pointed out later, it was no use at her age trying to tell her. After this, Mr. Sheer gave up again. For a second time, the toy spaniel necklace had to be abandoned, and the office was quiet once more.

  It was about this time that the telephone was shut off. The boys with their long-distance calls had given it the coup de grâce. We carried on without it, increasing, to make up for our inaccessibility, the volume of our correspondence. But after ten days of this our stationery was used up, and the stationers declined to print any more until the bill had been paid. We were now completely cut off from the outside world, and, though Mr. Sheer finally discovered a stationer who would give him credit, a week went by while we waited for the new paper to be finished, a week during which I did nothing—it was September now, but too hot even to read in the office. When at last it came, it did not, as Mr. Sheer said, have the same quality as the old; still, he was prepared to make the
best of it. I was just starting on a new series of letters when they came and took the typewriter away.

  The typewriter had seemed to me the one solid, permanent object in the gallery, but this, too, did not belong to Mr. Sheer. It had been rented from an agency.

  I decided to quit. The means of performing my duties no longer existed; I had been rendered impotent by creditors. Working for Mr. Sheer, moreover, had come to be a luxury for me. I had not been paid for some time, and I was supplying Mr. Sheer with a stream of nickels and dimes which he poured into the pay-telephone box in the lobby of the building. Also I had got to know Mr. Sheer so well that it was impossible for me to leave the gallery at six and carry with me the conviction that he had no way of getting a meal. So, unless one of us had another invitation, I had fallen into the habit of buying his dinner. Mr. Sheer was a connoisseur of the eighty-five-cent table d’hôte restaurants. We would eat and he would tell me stories of his past. It was not until much later that I realized how extraordinarily happy Mr. Sheer had been all through that terrible summer. At the time, I was sorry for him in the conventional way, but still I could not afford it. And, in any case, I told myself, it was just a question of time before the pack caught up with Mr. Sheer, and, somehow, I did not want to be in at the kill.

  Yet, after I had quit, when I would come back to see him, Mr. Sheer would still be there, the colored boy would still be there, and, as I have said, another girl would be in my place, with another typewriter. I would always scan the building directory downstairs to see if the Savile Galleries were still listed. For a long time they were, but then one day not a week after I had seen Mr. Sheer, the name was gone, and there was no forwarding address. The lifebelt, I presumed, had broken.

  But it was not quite over. More than a year later I discovered him by accident in a much larger and more impressive gallery tucked away in an arcade off Forty-seventh Street. He was still wearing the same suit, and the new gallery was like an enlargement of the old. He had taken Elmer and the red and green velvet drapes with him, the rooms were dark, and the priests’ robes glimmering down from the walls seemed exactly the same. I noticed a few horse sculptures, which were a departure, and there was a new and curious collection of Louis Quinze love seats, rented, he said, from a theatrical warehouse.