The Company She Keeps

by Mary McCarthy

  It happened at tea in the library one afternoon, when Jim had been married only a short time. Jim did not ordinarily come in for tea, but there was a new girl in the office, an assistant to the literary editor, and at four o’clock, the managing editor had poked her head in at Jim’s door and said in a sprightly voice, “You must come and meet our gay divorcee.” Jim had no interest in divorcees, and it seemed to him that the managing editor was being a little corny, as he put it, about the facts of life; nevertheless, he obeyed. When he shambled into the library, the girl was sitting across the room in a wing chair, with a cup of tea in her lap. She was telling anecdotes about Reno in a rather breathless voice, as if she were afraid of being interrupted, though everyone in the room was listening to her in fascinated silence. There was something about the scene that Jim did not like, and he went over to the shelves and took down a book.

  He had seen the girl before—he knew this at once—somewhere, in a bright-red evening dress that looked too old for her. It must have been at a prom or a football dance at Yale. Suddenly he remembered the whole thing—he had noticed her and thought that she was good-looking and a little bit fast (she had worn long gold earrings), and he had cut in on her without being introduced, just to see what she would say. To his astonishment, she had talked to him about poetry; the mask of the enchantress had dropped from her face and she had seemed excited and happy. In the middle of it, the man she had come with had tapped him on the shoulder with a grumpy air, and danced off with her. Jim had watched her from the sidelines for a little while, admitting to himself that she was having too good a time, or rather, that she was having the wrong kind of good time: she was not floating from man to man as a proper belle should, but talking, laughing, posing, making part of the effort herself. He ought not to have cut in on her without asking her man or some other person to introduce him; yet she had created the sort of lawless atmosphere that provoked such behavior. He did not cut in on her again, and he had never been able to make up his mind whether he liked her or not.

  Here she was again, looking rather prettier and younger, almost virginal, he thought, in a black dress with a white organdy ruffle at the neck; and yet again she was somehow out of bounds, and here in the library as on the dance floor she was having too much of a success.

  “This is Miss Sargent,” the managing editor said, taking his arm and leading him up to the girl’s chair.

  Jim smiled vaguely.

  “I liked your last article,” she said, “the one about the smooth-paper magazines.”

  “Speaking of that,” said Labor and Industry, “do you know that Trotsky has been writing for Liberty?”

  “Writing against Russia,” put in the foreign-news man, who was sympathetic with the Communist party.

  The managing editor bit her lips. “Oh, dear,” she exclaimed plaintively, like a mother who has lost control of her children, “I wish he wouldn’t do that! It’s such a shame to divide our forces now, when we need unity so badly.”

  The cup rattled on the new girl’s saucer. When Jim looked down he could see that she had spilled her tea. There was a brown pool in the saucer, and her cup dripped as she picked it up again.

  “It was just an historical piece,” she said stiffly.

  Several of the women exchanged smiles. “She’s supposed to be a Trotskyist,” the advertising manager, who was good-looking, whispered to Jim.

  “Is that all?” said the foreign-news man. “It’s simply a funny coincidence, I suppose, that it appeared in the place where it could furnish the most ammunition to the enemies of the Soviet Union?”

  “You would have been delighted to run it in the Liberal, of course,” said the girl with an ironical smile.

  The managing editor cut in. “Well, no, we wouldn’t. We have published things by Trotsky, but I think he goes too far. Solidarity on the left is so important at this moment. We can’t afford self-criticism now.”

  “What do you think, Jim?” said Labor and Industry.

  Jim cocked his head and considered the question. “I don’t agree with Helen,” he said finally, nodding toward the managing editor. “Any movement that doesn’t dare hear the truth about itself hasn’t got much on the ball, in my opinion. But I would say that you have to be careful where you print that truth. You want it to be read by your friends, not by your enemies. I think we should have published Trotsky’s piece in the Liberal. On the other hand, I think Trotsky made a mistake in giving it to Liberty. He might just as well have given it to Hearst.”

  The girl drew a deep breath. She looked stubborn and angry. All at once, Jim was sure that he liked her, for she was going to fight back, he saw, and it took courage to do that on your first day in a new job. He wondered, inspecting her clothes and trying to price them, whether she needed the money.

  “It’s a delicate problem,” she began, speaking slowly, as if she were trying to control her feelings and, at the same time in that stilted way that the Trotskyists had, as if they all, like the Old Man, spoke English with an accent, “and it’s a problem that none of you, or I, have had to face, because none of us are serious about revolution. You talk,” she turned to Jim, “as if it were a matter between you and God, or you and your individual, puritan conscience. You people worry all the time about your integrity, like a debutante worrying about her virginity. Just how far can she go and still be a good girl? Trotsky doesn’t look at it that way. For Trotsky it’s a relation between himself and the masses. How can he get the truth to the masses, and how can he keep himself alive in order to do that? You say that it would have been all right if he had brought the piece out in the Liberal. It would have been all among friends, like a family scandal. But who are these friends? Do you imagine that the Liberal is read by the masses? On the contrary, Liberty is read by the masses, and the Liberal is read by a lot of self-appointed delegates for the masses whose principal contact with the working class is a colored maid.”

  “The trade-union people read the Liberal,” said the managing editor, her square, plump face flushing indignantly.

  “Who? Dubinsky? Sidney Hillman?” She pronounced the names contemptuously. “I don’t doubt it. The point is, though, that you—” she turned again to Jim—“you admit that Trotsky is telling the truth, but you think that nobody is good enough to hear it except a select little circle of intellectuals and Liberal readers. What snobbism! Naturally,” she went on, “you have to be careful about how you write the article. You have to write it so that anybody who reads it with the minimum of attention will see that what you are saying to them about the Soviet Union is quite a different thing from what the editors of Liberty have been saying to them. You know, you might not think so, but it’s quite as possible for a revolutionist to make use of Hearst as it is for Hearst to make use of a revolutionist. Lenin went through Germany in a sealed train: the Germans thought they were using him, but he knew he was using the Germans. This Liberty business is the same thing on a smaller scale. The reactionaries have furnished Trotsky with a vehicle by which he can reach the masses. What would you have him do? Hold up his hands like a girl, and say, ‘Oh no! Think of my reputation! I can’t accept presents from strange gentlemen!’” Jim laughed out loud, and one or two of the older men snickered. “Besides,” she continued, dropping her voice a little, “there’s the problem of survival. The liberal magazines haven’t shown any desire to stake Trotsky to an orgy of free speech; his organization is poor; would you like it better if he starved?”

  She had finished, and she let her breath out in a tired exhalation, as if she had reached the top of a long flight of stairs. Nobody answered her, and after a moment she picked up her tea cup and began to drink with an air of intense concentration. This ostrich maneuver was classically unsuccessful, for everyone in the room continued to watch her, knowing, just as Jim did, that the tea must be stone-cold. At last, one of the older men spoke.

  “Well,” he said, with a sort of emaciated heartiness, “Trotsky must be a better man than I gave him credit for, to ha
ve such a pretty advocate.” The remark dropped like a stone into the pool of silence, setting up echoes of itself, little ripples of sound that spread and spread and finally died away.

  Jim stopped her on her way out of the office.

  “Ride down in the elevator with me,” he said.

  “I’ve been thinking,” he began as they stood waiting for the car, “you were absolutely right this afternoon. But you won’t last long here.”

  “I know it,” she said wryly, getting into the elevator. She shrugged her shoulders.

  “Is it true,” he asked, “that you’re a Trotskyite?”

  The girl shook her head.

  “I’m not even political,” she said.

  “But why—?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. I do admire Trotsky. He’s the most romantic man in modern times. And you all sounded so smug.” She paused to think. They were standing on the street in the autumn twilight now. “Working on a magazine like the Liberal does make you smug. You keep patting yourself on the back because you’re not working for Hearst. It’s like a lot of kept women feeling virtuous because they’re not streetwalkers. Oh yes, you’re being true to your ideals; and the kept women are being true to Daddy. But what if Daddy went broke, or the ideals ceased to pay a hundred and a quarter a week? What then? You don’t know and you’d rather not think about it. So when something like Trotsky’s writing for Liberty comes up, it makes you nervous, because it reminds you of the whole problem, and you are all awfully quick to say that never, under any circumstances, would you do that.”

  “Yes,” Jim said, “I see what you mean. But aren’t you being a little romantic? Aren’t you trying to say that we all ought to starve for our convictions?”

  Miss Sargent smiled.

  “I won’t say that, because if I said it, then I ought to go and do it, and I don’t want to. But I do think, somehow, that it ought to be a little bit harder than it is for you Liberal editors. It generally is, for people who are really independent. Society makes them scramble in one way or another. The thing is, Mr. Wendell did scramble, not financially, because he inherited money, but morally and probably socially, a long time ago. And you people are living off the moral income of that fight, just as you are living off his money income.”

  “What about you?” said Jim.

  “Oh, me, too,” said the girl. “But as you say, I won’t last long. Neither will you, I hope. The Liberal is all right as a stopgap, or as a job to support you while you’re writing a book; but the Liberal is not a way of life. If you begin to think that, you’re finished.”

  “What about Mr. Wendell?” said Jim. “It’s a way of life for him.”

  “Oh, Mr. Wendell! Mr. Wendell is a crusader. Of course, it’s a way of life for him. An honorable one. But the Liberal puts him in the red every year, while it puts you and me in the black. That’s one reason he’s managed to be serious for seventy years—every word costs him something. The good things in life are not free.”

  “Public opinion is against you there,” said Jim.

  “Maybe. Well, I must go.” She hesitated a moment. “How does the old man feel about the paper?”

  “Worried.”

  “Yes,” she said. “Like a self-made man who’s tried to give his children all the advantages he didn’t have. And then they turn out badly, and he can’t understand it. You prove my point for me. Well, good-bye.”

  He walked to the subway with her, and all the way home he thought about the conversation. He was very much excited and disturbed. At home he told Nancy what had happened.

  “She is going to stir up a lot of trouble,” said Nancy calmly.

  “Yes,” Jim answered, smiling, “that’s the kind of girl she is. A troublemaker.”

  “There must be something wrong with her.”

  “Yes,” said Jim. “I suppose there is.”

  It was queer, he thought, lying in bed that night (for he still did his thinking, like a boy, with the lights out), it was queer that Nancy had hit on it instantly. There must be something wrong with her. On the surface, it might appear that she had everything—looks and brains and health and youth and taste—and yet in a strange way she went against the grain. She was too tense, for one thing. It was as if she lived on excitement, situations, crises, trouble, as Nancy said. And she was not one of those happy trouble-makers who toss the apple of discord around as though it were a child’s ball. On the contrary, this afternoon in the library, she had been scared stiff. In one way, he was sure, she had not wanted to speak up for Trotsky at all; she had had to force herself to it, and the effort had left her white. You had to admire her courage for undertaking something that cost her so much; but then, he thought, why do it, why drive yourself if it doesn’t come easy? Nothing had been gained; Trotsky was no better off for her having spoken; and she herself, if she went on that way, would lose her job. For the spectator there had been something horrible about the scene; it was like watching a nervous trapeze artist performing on the high bars without a net: if the performer did not have iron nerves, he ought to get out of the business. “The coward dies a thousand deaths,” he murmured. “The brave but one.”

  “What did you say, dear?” asked Nancy from the other bed.

  “I didn’t know you were awake.”

  “I’ve got those cramps in my legs again.”

  She was seven months pregnant.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I was just thinking out loud.”

  “About that girl, I bet,” she said cheerfully.

  “Yes.”

  “Watch out!” said Nancy in a bantering voice.

  “Hell,” Jim answered, and his reply had more distaste in it than he had intended to put there. “I wouldn’t have her for anybody’s money. Besides,” he went on, “she’s supposed to be engaged. She divorced her husband to marry some other guy. Though when I left her this evening, she looked to me like a girl who didn’t have a date. She lingered, you know …”

  “Yes,” said Nancy. “Well, I guess you’re safe.”

  Two months later, en route between a cocktail party and a political dinner, he kissed Miss Sargent in a taxi. Nancy was in the hospital with a new baby girl, and as he leaned down toward his companion, it seemed to him that this fact justified the kiss, lent it indeed the stamp of orthodoxy—young husbands were supposed to go slightly on the loose when their wives were in the hospital having babies; it was the Yale thing, the manly thing, to do. Yet he had hardly framed the excuse to himself when he heard his own voice speaking, a little thick with Martinis and emotion.

  “I love you,” he said, and listened to the words with surprise, for this was not on the cards at all, and he did not even know if it were true.

  “I know,” she whispered, and as soon as he heard her say this he was convinced that it was true, and he began to feel joyfully unhappy.

  “Ever since that Shef dance,” he continued. “You wore a red dress.” Now he believed (for he was a little tight and every love must have its legend) that he had been fatefully in love with her for years, but that there had been some barrier between them; yet at the same time, kept, as it were, in the cold-storage compartment of his heart, was the certainty that the only barrier that had ever existed was the faint distaste he felt for what was extreme and headstrong and somehow unladylike in her nature.

  “I didn’t think you remembered,” she said. “Why didn’t you cut in on me again?”

  “You terrified me,” he said, knowing, all at once, that this too was true.

  The taxi had drawn up to the door of a third-rate hotel that was frequently used for left-wing, money-raising evenings.

  “Do you want to go in?” he said.

  “Of course,” she answered, and raised her head for him to kiss her.

  He was disappointed. He had half-expected her to say something foolish and passionate like, “Let’s keep on driving around all night,” or something sultry like, “Come home with me.” Her equanimity angered him, for what good was a girl like this unles
s she was foolish and passionate and sultry? He did not kiss her again, but gave her shoulder a slight, friendly push toward the doorman who was waiting to open the cab door. She evaded the doorman’s hand and jumped out. By the time Jim had finished paying the cab, she had disappeared into the hotel.

  Jim was at the speakers’ table, though he was not scheduled to give a formal talk. From where he sat he could see the girl, eating with some people he did not know. He counted them carefully; the number was uneven; unquestionably, she was the extra girl. The discovery gave him a strange kind of satisfaction: she was free, and the evening was not over; anything could still happen; on the other hand, the fact that she was so patently free, dangling there at her table under his eyes, made it easy for him to relinquish her in his mind. He had already decided to go home early and call Nancy the first thing in the morning to tell her how much he loved her, when he looked down at the girl’s table and found that she was gone. Her friends were still there; there was only a single empty chair pushed back from the table, as if it had been abandoned in a hurry. He was filled with despair. His prudent, saving self told him that at least he could still call Nancy with a clear conscience—that much had been salvaged from the evening—but the notion no longer pleased him; there is something savorless about a profit that has not been made at somebody else’s expense. He began to move about restlessly on his chair, and at the first break between the speeches, he went out to the bar.