The Company She Keeps

by Mary McCarthy

  This was Pflaumen’s apogee. Having tapped on his glass to get the table’s attention, he read aloud the Château and the year, and then uncorked the bottle himself, standing up to do it. Somebody at the end of the table, a man with a hearty voice, called, “Look out, there, George Arliss may come out of that bottle!” Pflaumen, pouring a little into his own glass, laughed with the others, but he was not quite pleased—it was the sort of joke he was capable of making himself. “Give us a speech, about the wine,” said one of the ladies obligingly. “The way they do at gourmet dinners.” “Why,” said Pflaumen, still standing at the head of the table with the bottle in his hand, “it’s not one of the great Bordeaux….” “I prefer the word ‘claret,’” someone else put in, “it’s so full of English history.” “You mean,” retorted Pflaumen, “English history is so full of it.” He waited for the laugh, which came reluctantly—it was said that Pflaumen had “a pretty wit,” but there was something chilling about it; he had never learned how to throw a line away. “Anyway,” he went on, with a little laugh, so that no one should think he took all this too seriously, “it’s a nice brisk wine, on the astringent side. I thought it would do well with the steak.” “Perfect!” exclaimed a lady, though the glasses were still empty. “Of course I think it’s silly,” continued Pflaumen, starting to go round the table with the bottle, “to be too pedantic about what you drink with what. I’ll take a good Burgundy with a broiler and a Rhine wine with a kidney chop any time I can get it.” Murmurs of approval greeted this unconventional statement, and Pflaumen passed on down the line, carefully decanting the wine into each glass.

  Across the table from you someone refused, and all the rest raised their heads with an identical look of worry. It was the young Russian Jew, the instructor in law at Columbia, who wore a rather quizzical, sardonic expression on a pure Italianate face. His Marxist study of jurisprudence had created a stir. Still, perhaps Fleischer had made a mistake in him. Was it possible that he was not an eccentric but a crank? This act of abstention was a challenge to everyone at the table, an insult to the host. For almost a full minute nobody spoke, but muscles tightened with hostility. In different circumstances the young man might have been lynched.

  “You don’t drink?” said a woman at last in a loud, bewildered voice.

  “I drank a cocktail,” he admitted. “It went to my head. If I took any more I might make a fool of myself.” He twisted his head and looked up at Pflaumen with a disarming boyish grin. “You’ll have to give me a course in the art of drinking. That’s one subject that was left out of my proletarian education.” He pronounced the last words mildly, with a sort of droll self-mockery that deprecated, ever so faintly, his innocence, his poor Russian parents, his studiousness, the Talmudic simplicity of his life. There was a burst of relieved laughter, and after that everyone liked him. Thank God, was the general feeling, he had turned out not to be one of those Marxist prigs!

  Once the wine was poured, Pflaumen took very little part in the conversation. He leaned back in his chair with the air of a satisfied impresario, embracing all his guests in a smile of the most intense and proprietary affection. Now and then, this look of commendation would rest particularly on you; whenever this happened, it was as if, in his delight, he had reached over and squeezed you. From time to time, his cup of bliss would appear to run over, and the smile would break into a short high giggle. When the spasm was over, he would take out his handkerchief and carefully wipe his eyes, and the old-fashioned masculinity of this gesture made a strange contrast with the schoolgirlish sound he had just produced. Sitting at his left hand, you looked down at your plate until this display was finished. There was something androgynous about Pflaumen, something not pansy, but psychically hermaphroditic that was always disconcerting you. It was as if the male and female strains in his personality had never blended, but were engaged in some perennial household spat that you were obliged to eavesdrop on. For, when you came to think of it, the Jewish paterfamilias was not the only figure that kept hovering behind your host’s well-padded shoulder; there was also a young girl, newly married to a man already coarse and comfortable, a young girl playing house all by herself in a fine establishment full of wedding presents that both astonished and saddened her. Most Jewish men were more feminine than Gentile men of similar social background. You had noticed this and had supposed, vaguely, that it was the mark matriarchy had left on them, but looking at Pflaumen you saw the whole process dramatically. The matriarch had begun by being married off to a husband who was prosperous and settled and older than herself, and her sons she had created in her own image, forlorn little bridegrooms to a middle-aged bride.

  In most of the men, the masculine influence had, in the end, overridden or absorbed the feminine, and you saw only vestigial traces of the mother. There might be a tendency to hypochondria, a readiness to take offense, personal vanity, love of comfort, love of being waited on and made much of; and, on the other hand, there would be unusual intuitive powers, sympathy, loyalty, tenderness, domestic graces and kindnesses unknown to the Gentile. But with Pflaumen it was not a question of the survival of a few traits. Two complete personalities had been preserved in him, as in a glacier. Half of him was a successful businessman and half of him was playing house. These dinners of his were like children’s tea parties, and in this lay their strength and their weakness. They had the sort of perfection that can only be achieved in miniature. The groaning board was not in Pflaumen’s style at all: one exquisite dish, one vegetable, a salad and some cheese were what you got, rarely a soup, never a dessert. You thought of your little electric stove, your cambric tea or hot chocolate and your petits fours from the caterer. But more important than the perfection of the appointments was the illusion of a microcosm Pflaumen was able to create, the sense of a little world that was exactly the same as the big world, though it had none of the pain or care.

  Each of Pflaumen’s guests had been selected, as it were, for his allegorical possibilities, and every dinner was presented as a morality play in which art and science, wealth and poverty, business and literature, sex and scholarship, vice and virtue, Judaism and Christianity, Stalinism and Trotskyism, all the antipodes of life, were personified and yet abstract. Tonight there was John Peterson, who stood for criticism and also for official Communism. There was Jim Berolzheimer, a bright young man in one of the great banking houses, who represented capitalism, and his wife who painted pictures and was going to have a baby, and was therefore both art and motherhood. There was Henry Slater, the publisher, very flirtatious, with a shock of prematurely white hair, who was sex, and his wife, an ash-blond woman with a straight bang, who kept a stable full of horses and had no opinions and was sport. There was a woman psychoanalyst who got herself up in a Medici gown and used a cigarette holder. There was a pretty English girl named Leslie who worked on Time. There was the young Jew, Martin Erdman, who did not drink. There was Pflaumen himself, who stood for trade marks and good living, and you, who stood for literature and the Fourth International. After dinner there might be others: a biologist and his wife, a man who was high up in the Newspaper Guild, a matronly young woman who wore her hair in a coronet around her head and was active in the League of Women Shoppers, a Wall Street lawyer, a wine dealer, a statistician.

  And here was the striking effect produced by Pflaumen’s dinners: you truly felt yourself turning into an abstraction of your beliefs and your circumstances. Contradictions you had known in yourself melted away; challenged by its opposite, your personality hardened into something unequivocal and defiant—your banners were flying. All the guests felt this. If you asserted your Trotskyism, your poverty, your sexual freedom, the expectant mother radiated her pregnancy, the banker basked in his reactionary convictions, and John Peterson forgot about Montaigne and grew pale as an El Greco saint in his defense of Spanish democracy. Everybody, for the moment, knew exactly who he was. Pflaumen had given you all your identity cards, just as a mother will assign personalities to each of her brood of ch
ildren: Jack is hard-working and steady, Billy is a flash-in-the-pan, never can finish anything he starts. Mary is dreamy, Helen is practical. While it lasted, the feeling was delightful; and at the dinner table everyone was heady with a peculiar, almost lawless excitement, like dancers at a costume ball.

  It was only when you caught a glimpse of the author of your happiness, ensconced there, so considerate, so unobtrusive, at the head of his table, that your conviction wavered. To the others, too, he must have been a disturbing factor, for throughout the meal there was a tacit conspiracy to ignore the host, to push him out of the bright circle he had so painstakingly assembled. Once the dinner got under way, nobody accorded him more than a hasty glance. If he dropped a pun or a platitude into the conversation, it was just as if he had dropped a plate: there would be a moment of frozen silence, then the talk would go on as before.

  Pflaumen did not appear to mind this; in fact, he seemed to accept it as natural. Here in this apartment, all the rules of ordinary politeness were suspended; and at first you were so caught up in your own gaiety that you hardly noticed this, and it seemed to you, too, perfectly natural that no one should speak to the host. But gradually, as in a dream, you became aware that the laws of the normal world were not operating here, that something was wrong, that nothing was what it seemed to be, that the church bell you were listening to was really the alarm clock. And, just as in a dream, the exhilaration continued for a little, but underneath it ran distrust and terror. You knew that it was not what it pretended to be, this microcosm of your host’s, for if it were actually so fine and first-rate, Pflaumen himself would not be in it, even on sufferance. He was the clue in the detective story, the piece of thread, the thumbprint, the bullet in the wainscoting, that stares up at the bright detective and tells him that the well-arranged scene before him is the work, not of Nature, but of Man. You had only to look at him to know that the morality play was just a puppet show, that the other guests did not represent the things they were supposed to, that they could be fitted into this simulacrum of the larger world precisely because they were small, unreal figures, and with growing anxiety you asked yourself, “Why am I in it too?”

  The conversation around you began to sound peculiarly flat. “Cultivate your own garden is what I told her,” the publisher was saying. “She’ll never understand politics.” “She’d do better to cultivate her gardener—like Lady Chatterley,” put in the English girl. Next to her, John Peterson went on talking through her joke. He was a little tight. “This back-stabbing that goes on here makes me want to vomit,” he said. “I can’t listen to it after what I’ve seen in Madrid. I’ve heard La Pasionara sing. What do these petty political squabbles mean to her? She’s got a heart as big as the Spanish earth.”

  Suddenly you knew that you must cut yourself off from these people, must demonstrate conclusively that you did not belong here. You took a deep breath and leaned across the table toward John Peterson. “God damn you,” you said in a very loud voice, such as you had once heard a priest use to denounce sinners from the pulpit, “God damn you, what about Andres Nin?” You felt your body begin to shake with stage fright and the blood rush up into your face and you heard the gasp go around the table, and you were gloriously happy because you had been rude and politically unfashionable, and really carried beyond yourself, an angel warrior with a flaming sword. Surely, there could be no doubt that you had put yourself beyond the pale. But when you looked up you saw that Pflaumen was beaming at you again, his eyes wetter than ever, as proud as if you had just spoken your first word to an audience of aunts.

  “Meg is a violent Trotskyist,” he said tenderly. “She thinks the rest of us are all GPU agents.” The publisher, who had been concentrating on the English girl, looked across the table at you, sizing you up for the first time. “My God,” he said, “you’re certainly spirited about it.” Martin Erdman was watching you, too. He clapped his hands twice in pantomime and gave you a long, ironic smile. You bent your head and blushed, and, though you were excited, your heart sank. You knew that you were not a violent Trotskyist, and Erdman must know it too. It was just that you were temperamentally attracted to unpopular causes: when you were young, it had been the South, the Dauphin, Bonnie Prince Charlie; later it was Debs and now Trotsky that you loved. You admired this romantic trait in yourself and you would confess humorously: “All I have to do is be for somebody and he loses.” Now it came to you that perhaps this was just another way of showing off, of setting yourself apart from the run of people. Your eyes began to fill with tears of shame; you felt like Peter in the Garden, but yours was, you knew, the greater blasphemy: social pressure had made Peter deny the Master; it had made you affirm him—it was the difference between plain and fancy cowardice.

  You held your eyes wide open to keep the tears from falling. The others, staring at you, must certainly think that your brimming eyes testified to the depth of your feeling for the murdered Nin. You tossed your head slightly and the tears began to settle.

  “You are,” you said, “a lot of you, GPU agents. The trouble is you’re such idiots you don’t even get paid for it.”

  It was a harsh joke, but it was a joke, and it was your peace offering. There was a cackle of laughter, and then everyone but John Peterson and Erdman was looking at you fondly, as if they were all much older than you were. Peterson cast you a malignant glance from his pale eyes, but he did not say anything. He was not too drunk to know that though the others actually agreed with him about Nin (or else did not care), temporarily, in some way, you had got them on your side. Erdman did not speak either; he nodded his head twice in the same tempo he had clapped his hands in, and kept smiling at you with that strange, mocking, affectionate expression.

  You saw how profitable that exchange had been for you: it had earned you an enemy and, you thought, a lover. The first thing made you feel good, and the second saddened you. The next morning the phone would wake you and you would reach out and take it dreamily and it would be Erdman speaking very softly, asking you to have tea with him. You could see how it would all be. You would go to bed with him finally, but it would not last long, because you had both been compromised at this dinner party, and you had both understood this and understood each other. “Have you seen Pflaumen lately?” he would ask from time to time, and you would not be able to meet his eyes when you answered yes or no. He would not pursue the subject (you would never dare discuss Pflaumen together), but both of you would be silently asking the same question: what weakness, what flimsiness of character, what opportunism or cynicism had put the other into Pflaumen’s hands?

  On the other hand, you would treat each other gently, with a special tenderness, as though you were both wounded. For if, in one way, your love would be full of doubt, in another, it would be over-full of comprehension, lacking in mystery, like the grave dreary love between brother and sister. You had recognized him in the scene about the wine; he had recognized you in the scene about Nin. You would have liked, both of you, to play a lone hand; but you had not been strong enough for it. In each case, your war of independence had been an inglorious Putsch (“Excuse me, Officer, I was only fooling.”)

  While the coffee and liqueurs were being served, new people came in, and the party broke up into smaller units. The publisher whispered in the English girl’s ear; the banker talked Bermuda with the publisher’s wife. John Peterson, glassy-eyed, exhorted the woman psychoanalyst—“But surely in his later years Freud played into Hitler’s hands.” You stood beside Martin Erdman, not talking, listening to the others, sharing an ironic smile between you. Pflaumen sat on a sofa beside the expectant mother; he was telling her about a new product he had just had trademarked, while she went through a pantomime of congratulation. Only she could afford to be polite, for she had nothing to gain now from social intercourse, and, being easily fatigued, nothing much to give. She was comfortable with Pflaumen; he took her hand and she let him hold it; he was one of her oldest friends.

  What had happened to you with Erd
man was happening with others all over the room. Men were taking out address books or repeating phone numbers in low voices. There was a slight shuffle of impatience; nothing more could be done here; it was time to go and yet it was much too early.

  People got up and shifted around, like people in a railroad station when the stationmaster has come in to announce that the train will be forty minutes late. New combinations were formed. The publisher was sitting on the arm of your chair now, asking if you would like to write an opinion on a manuscript. You agreed, and for you, too, now the party was over. You had got everything you came for—a new lover and some work to do. Pflaumen came and sat at your feet on the floor. “You were wonderful,” he said, looking up at you with that over-energetic expression of delight. You had an unaccountable impulse to kick him exactly where the paunch should have been. “The Berolzheimers are crazy about you,” he went on, ignoring your angry look, putting it down to “temperament,” an inestimable commodity. “They want me to bring you to dinner next Wednesday.” You raised your eyebrows into circles of surprise; yet you had known, ever since that scene at the table, that the Berolzheimers would invite you. They were pleasant and they would have a nice house with good food, and there would be new people there; it would be interesting to see the world through a banker’s eyes.

  “Are you having fun?” asked Pflaumen, drawing his knees up and hugging them with his arms in a real ecstasy of coziness.

  “Yes,” you said. “It’s a very gay party.”

  “Erdman is interesting …” he began tentatively.

  You don’t miss a trick, you thought, but you answered him impassively. “Is he?” you said. “I can’t really tell. I haven’t talked much to him.”