The Company She Keeps

by Mary McCarthy

  “I was thinking,” she said, “how utterly fantastic it is to imagine you on a tear.”

  “Don’t you suppose I have any fun?” There was a certain wistfulness in the question that must have got in by mistake.

  “No doubt you do,” she said, “but I think you must have to work awfully hard at it.”

  “What do you suppose I do for relaxation?”

  Relaxation, she thought; there is the key word. There the poor pedant betrays himself.

  “Well,” she said, “you see about six plays a year. Your wife makes a list of the things that are really worth while, and you check them off one by one. You get the tickets well in advance, and you generally take another couple with you. You never go on the spur of the moment; you never take standing room. Sometimes somebody in your party knows the girl who is playing the ingénue, and then you go backstage afterwards. You meet some of the actors and think it’s a lot of fun. Once in a while, you go to a benefit concert with your mother or your wife’s mother. Myra Hess for the British Relief. You like the movies, and you never miss one that the New Yorker recommends. Now and then, if your party is feeling particularly reckless, you go to a swing-music joint. You’re not much of a dancer, but you ask the other guy’s wife to dance once; after that you sit out because the floor is too crowded. In the summer you commute to your mother-in-law’s place at Larchmont or Riverside. There is a nice crowd of young doctors there, and you kid each other about who is going to go into the water first. Probably there is a certain amount of splashing, but nobody loses his temper, and afterwards you play medicine ball on the beach. Your wife likes tennis, but you don’t go in for it, on account of your eyes. Your wife has a three-quarter-length silver-fox coat and several very dear girl friends. You take excellent care of your health. You have small feet and are proud of it, and this is your only foible.”

  “What makes you so sure of all this?”

  “Oh, I don’t know, I’ve got a good eye for social types, and I’ve had a lot of practice. When I was in college, I was a perennial house guest. I never went home for vacations, you know.”

  She was anxious, now, to change the subject. She had enjoyed doing that malicious portrait, but suddenly toward the end her self-confidence had wavered. Supposing she were wrong? He would not tell her. She would never know. It was like doing an algebra problem and finding that the answers were missing from the back of the book. She felt the ground give way beneath her.

  “Nothing I could do would surprise you?” he said.

  She began to cry.

  “Oh!” she exclaimed. “Why do you lead me on so? It’s not fair! You make me say all these awful things to you, and then you won’t even tell me whether I’m right or not.”

  The tears streamed from her eyes. She opened her pocketbook and found, as usual, no handkerchief. He took a box of Kleenex from a drawer and handed it to her silently.

  “Thank you,” she said, still sobbing. “Do you keep that specially for me or do all your patients weep?”

  He did not answer. He never answered questions of this sort.

  “What made you cry?” he said at length, in that falsely casual tone he used whenever he asked her an important question.

  “You made me feel like a fool,” she said. “I extended myself and you sat and watched. It was like one of those exposure dreams. You go into a restaurant and you think how beautiful and chic you are. You even pose a little, toss your head, draw off your gloves very, very slowly, like an actress. And then all of a sudden you look down and you see that you have nothing on but a pair of pink pants. And the worst of it is that nobody shows the slightest surprise; there is no commotion; the headwaiter doesn’t come and ask you to leave. Everyone goes on eating and talking, so that you think that maybe your eyes have deceived you, and you look stealthily down again, hoping to find your clothes back on. But no; you are still in the same condition. Then you try to tell yourself that perhaps nobody has noticed anything, that if you behave very, very quietly and do not call attention to yourself, your lapse will pass unobserved. But all the time you know that this is not true. They are all watching you, but out of cruelty they will give no sign. If one of your companions were to say, “Why, Meg, you’re undressed,” the situation would be saved. You could exclaim, “Why, gee, I am,” and people would lend you things and laugh and fuss over you, and the whole thing would turn into one of those jolly Embarrassing Moments that readers send in to the Daily Mirror. “‘Imagine my mortification, but there I was without a stitch of clothes!’”

  Dr. James laughed.

  “Yes,” he said. “But what is there about you that you don’t want me to see?” He spoke softly now, in the tone of a conspirator in a Grade B movie. “What is it, Meg, that you are so ashamed of?”

  She pressed her hands wearily to her forehead. If he would give up this whispering, she could forgive everything. It made them both ridiculous. She longed to reply in a sepulchral voice, “Dr. James, when I was a little girl, I buried my four-year-old cousin alive.” (Sensation in the courtroom!) “But don’t tell anybody.” However, these miserable jokes of hers wasted a great deal of time. She knew exactly what would follow. He would scribble furiously in his notebook for a few seconds, and then the questions would come. Did you ever play with a four-year-old cousin? Did you ever want to bury anybody alive? Where did you get this idea of interment? And so on, through The Last Days of Pompeii, A Cask of Amontillado, and the giant, whatever his name was, who slept restlessly under Aetna. Matthew Arnold, Empedocles. And Karl Marx: “weighs like an Alp” on the something-or-other.

  “Nothing, Dr. James, nothing. There’s nothing I ever did that I haven’t told you.” (But what about the time she had stolen the ring from the five-and-ten and her aunt had made her take it back and confess to the manager? Could it be that? Oh, surely not, her common sense replied. All children steal, and she had already told him of a half a dozen other childish thefts: the cookies from the pantry, the small change from her aunt’s bureau, the dime for the collection plate she had spent on candy. Oh, surely not! And yet … What if it were important and she failed to tell him? What if her reluctance to delay over a trifle really masked an unconscious fear? In this room, you never knew whether you were putting obstacles in the way or clearing the path. It was a question of relevance, but how could you determine what was relevant to the Unknown?)

  Fortunately, he was speaking and she did not have to decide.

  “Understand me,” he said. “I don’t think it’s anything you did. It’s a feeling that you have about yourself, a feeling that there is something about you that you have to conceal.”

  He means sex, she thought with relief. It was not the ring, after all. She could feel her mind wrinkle into a smile. We are heading for the castration complex, she told herself, the horror of the little girl when she discovers that an important part of her is missing.

  “I don’t believe in it,” she said aloud.

  “Don’t believe in what?”

  “All this castration nonsense.”

  “How do you know I was going to mention that?”

  “Weren’t you?”

  “Well, as a matter of fact, I was.” (Ah, she thought, without pleasure, I can read him like a book.) “But,” he continued, “I am not trying to foist this idea on you. It was you who brought it up.”

  “Oh, Dr. James,” she murmured reproachfully. “You turn everything to your own advantage. If I can read your mind, you say that I put the idea there.”

  “No,” he said. “Think! What are the pink pants in your dream there for? What are they hiding?”

  She looked quickly up at him, struck by his question, proud of him for having asked it. Perhaps he was not so stupid as she feared.

  “It’s true,” she admitted, “when men have exposure dreams, they’re always completely naked. Most women, too. The pink pants are a little idiosyncrasy of my own. Maybe you’ve got it, Dr. James.” She felt suddenly excited and gay. Everything was going to be all right.
They were on the scent. The fugitive, criminal self lay hiding in a thicket, but the hounds of the intellect were hot in pursuit. Ah, she thought, thank God for the mind, the chart, the compass. Of course, the universe had to be meaningful. There can be no question without an answer; if you throw a ball up, it must come down. Her life was not mere gibberish; rather, it was like one of those sealed mystery stories where the reader is on his honor not to go beyond a certain page until he has guessed the identity of the murderer. She had come to that imperative blank page again and again and stopped and retraversed her ground, looking for the obvious, unobtrusive clue, the thing that everyone overlooked and that was nevertheless as plain as the nose on your face. “The Clue of the Pink Pants,” she said to herself. “The publishers take pride in announcing a new kind of detective story by a young author.” But, seriously, if that were really it …

  Then she could go on. She paused to examine this phrase, the vague, dramatic resonance of it, the hollowness of the two o’s echoing in a triumph of onomatopoeia the emptiness of the mind that framed it. It was a phrase that came to her lips a dozen times a day. Bumping along on a Madison Avenue bus, she would find herself hammering her fist on her knees and crying out to herself in a sort of whispered shriek, “I can’t go on, I CANNOT GO ON.” And at home, in the apartment on Sutton Place (“not one of the really smart ones, my dear, just one of Vincent Astor’s remodeled tenements”), she would suddenly set her fork down on her plate and say to her husband, “I can’t go on. Listen to me, Frederick, I can’t go on.” She would watch the surprise invade his anxious face, the pain, the irritation, the Do-we-have-to-go-through-all-this-again, the doubt (tact or brutality, which was the better method?), the desire to get through the meal in peace, the final decision to humor her until the maid brought the coffee in. “Finish your supper, my dear,” he would say, calmly, easily, so as not to put pressure on her. In the end, she would pick up her fork again and, with an exaggerated listlessness, begin to eat. This was what she could not forgive herself: the capitulation. If she had any strength of character, she would commit suicide. But they would never find her body in the river. Ah, no, not she! She knew which side her bread was buttered on. Better a live coward than a dead hero, as her colored maid always said. “Cemetery’s full of heroes,” she could hear the soft, wicked Negro voice. Lacedaemonians, shed a tear … Maestius lacrimis Simonideis. The distich of grief was not for her. She remembered how in boarding school, bemused by sad poetry out of an anthology, she had sat half one night with her feet hanging out her window, knowing that she would never have the heart to jump, yet telling herself from moment to moment that of course in five minutes, ten minutes, fifteen, she would. When, at last, she had crept back into her bed, cold and dispirited, the romantic melancholy had blown away, leaving her with a mild, depression, for she had in truth seen her own grave, the narrow, schoolgirl’s bed with its regulation blanket which she would always, however late, return to. It was characteristic, she thought now, that she had not even caught a cold.

  “But why should you have committed suicide?” Dr. James had said. “You reproach yourself unnecessarily.” “You have got everything upside down,” her husband told her. And from their point of view, they were quite right. Why shouldn’t she finish her dinner, love her husband, have a baby, stay alive? Where was the crime? There was the class crime, to be sure, yet it was not for having money that she hated herself, but (be honest, she murmured) for having some but not enough. If she could have been very rich … It was the ugly cartoon of middle-class life that she detested, Mr. and Mrs., Jiggs and Maggie, the Norths in the New Yorker. And the more stylish you tried to make it, smearing it over with culture and good taste, Swedish modern and Paul Klee, the more repellent it became: the cuspidors and the silk lampshades in the funny papers did not stab the heart half so cruelly as her own glass shelves with the white pots of ivy, her Venetian blinds, her open copy of a novel by Kafka, all the objects that were waiting for her at home, each in its own patina of social anxiety. Ah God, it was too sad and awful, the endless hide-and-go-seek game one played with the middle class. If one could only be sure that one did not belong to it, that one was finer, nobler, more aristocratic. The truth was she hated it shakily from above, not solidly from below, and her proletarian sympathies constituted a sort of snub that she administered to the middle class, just as a really smart woman will outdress her friends by relentlessly underdressing them. Scratch a socialist and you find a snob. The semantic test confirmed this. In the Marxist language, your opponent was always a parvenu, an upstart, an adventurer, a politician was always cheap, and an opportunist vulgar. But the proletariat did not talk in such terms; this was the tone of the F.F.V. What the socialist movement did for a man was to allow him to give himself the airs of a marquis without having either his title or his sanity questioned.

  No, it was not really the humanitarian side of socialism that touched her; though she was moved by human misery when it was brought to her attention, if she went to buy a suit at Bonwit Teller, she was never troubled by irrelevant memories of the slums she had passed through on her way. Her aunt had been one of those pious women who could not look at a garbage pail without being reminded of the fact that there were people in the world who had nothing to eat. “It’s a sin to throw that away,” she was always saying, and her hyperestheticism on this point allowed her to practice an extreme parsimony with a good conscience. But she herself, thank God, was not like that. In this respect, she took after her father, who in his rather uninspired way had been fond of good cigars, good Bourbon, eau lilas végétale, crabmeat, alligator pears, and hotel suites. It was curious, she thought, that all the Puritan penny-pinching should have been on the Catholic side of her family, while her father, that stern Yankee, with his thin skin, his methodical habits, his civic-mindedness, his devout sense of what was proper, should have spent his life buying encyclopedia sets, worthless real estate, patents on fantastic inventions, and have died, to everyone’s astonishment, overdrawn at the bank. What a strange childhood she had had! (“No wonder,” Dr. James sometimes murmured, in a slightly awestruck voice, “no wonder,” meaning no wonder she had turned out so badly. And it was true, she supposed, Freud would have labored in vain if she had not ended up, sobbing, on a psychoanalyst’s blue couch. She was a real Freudian classic, and as such faintly monstrous, improbable, like one of those French plays that demonstrate as if on a blackboard the axioms of the Romantic movement. It was not merely a distaste for the obvious that had led both her and the doctor to avoid, insofar as it was possible, lengthy discussions of her childhood. The subject frightened them both, for it suggested to them that the universe is mechanical, utterly predictable, frozen, and this in its own way is quite as terrible as the notion that the universe is chaotic. It is essential for our happiness, she thought, to have both the pattern and the loose ends, to roughen the glassy hexameter with the counter-rhythm of speech.)

  Up to the time her mother had died, she had been such an elegant little girl. She remembered her ermine neckpiece and the ermine muff that went with it, her two baby rings with the diamonds in them, the necklace of seed pearls. All a little on the ostentatious side, she admitted, but it had been an era of bad taste. Then, after the flu was over, and mamma did not come home from the hospital, Aunt Clara had moved in, the rings were put in the vault (to keep for you until you’re older), the ermine set wore out, the velocipede broke, the white sand darkened in the sandpile, there were prunes and rice pudding on the table, and the pretty little girl who looked (everybody said) so much like her mother was changed into a stringy, bow-legged child with glasses and braces on her teeth, long underwear, high shoes, blue serge jumpers that smelled, and a brown beaver hat two sizes too big for her.

  Ah, she said to herself now, I reject this middle-class tragedy, this degenerated Victorian novel where I am Jane Eyre or somebody in Dickens or Kipling or brave little Elsie Dinsmore fainting over the piano. I reject the whole pathos of the changeling, the orphan, the stepc
hild. I reject this trip down the tunnel of memory which resembles nothing so much as a trip down the Red Mill at Coney Island, with my aunt and her attributive razor strop substituting for Lizzie Borden and her ax. I reject all those tableaux of estrangement: my father in his smoking jacket at the card table with his nightly game of solitaire forever laid out before him, my aunt with her novel by Cardinal Wiseman that she is reading for the fifteenth time, and myself with the cotton handkerchief that I must hem and re-hem because the stitches are never small enough; I deny the afternoon I deliver my prize-winning essay at the Town Auditorium and there is no family there to applaud me because my father is away on a hunting trip, and my aunt, having just beaten me for my error in winning the prize (“You are too stuck-up already”), is at home in her bedroom having hysterics; and also the scene at the summer resort where the lady looks up from the bridge table and utters her immortal tag line, “Surely, Mr. Sargent, this isn’t your daughter!” It is all too apropos for acceptance.

  Yet what were you going to do? You could not treat your life-history as though it were an inferior novel and dismiss it with a snubbing phrase. It had after all been like that. Her peculiar tragedy (if she had one) was that her temperament was unable to assimilate her experience; the raw melodrama of those early years was a kind of daily affront to her skeptical, prosaic intelligence. She remembered the White Russian gentleman she had met once at a party. They were asking him about his escape from the Soviets, and he had reached the point in his story where he saw his brother shot by the Bolsheviks. Here, at the most harrowing moment of his narrative, he faltered, broke off, and finally smiled, an apologetic, self-depreciatory smile which declared, “I know that this is one of the clichés of the Russians in exile. They have all seen their brothers or sisters shot before their eyes. Excuse me, please, for having had such a commonplace and at the same time such an unlikely experience.” That terrible smile had filled her with love and pity; she had “recognized” him at once, and afterwards on the street she had kissed him, because she too knew what it was to have a sense of artistic decorum that like a hoity-toity wife was continually showing one’s poor biography the door.