The Company She Keeps

by Mary McCarthy

  Already, in her own case, the effects of treatment were noticeable. “You have lost those unnatural high spirits,” her friends told her. “You are not so tense as you used to be. You don’t get so excited about causes.” It was true, she was more subdued; she did not assert herself in company; she let her husband talk on his own subjects, in his own vein; she told white lies, where before she had only told black ones. She learned to suppress the unpleasant, unnecessary truths: why let an author know that you do not like his book, why spoil a party by getting into an argument, why not tell your friend that her ugly house is pretty? And why mention to your husband that you have spent too much money on an evening dress, gone to the races and lost, had too much to drink, let a man kiss you in the pantry? Pay your debt with the housekeeping money, take your mother’s bracelet to the pawnshop, stifle the hangover with benzedrine, say the ice tray stuck and you were a long time getting it out. Do, in other words, what every normal wife does, agree and go your own way (it would only upset him if he knew; it is not important anyway; he would think I was silly to mention it). And if you want the last chop on the plate, the last drink in the bottle, take it, do not force it on him merely because you want it so much—that would simply be making a nuisance of yourself. Stop trying to be fair; only a child insists that everything should be divided equally. Grab whatever you need; he will do the same to you.

  What Frederick had not foreseen was that the good would vanish with the bad, that a man may easily overreach himself in making provisions for his comfort. His situation was like that of a woman who gets a hat altered to suit her features. It is only a small adjustment, the crown is lowered or heightened, the rakish feather is removed; there is no longer any fault to be found, but the customer looks in the mirror and weeps for her folly, because the hat is no longer stylish. Moreover, it is not returnable; it must lie in the closet for a certain number of seasons, till it is old enough to be given to a charity. And she herself was not returnable either. She could no longer go back into circulation, as she had done so often before. The little apartment in the Village, the cocktail parties, the search for a job, the loneliness, the harum-scarum, Bohemian habits, all this was now unthinkable for her. She had lost the life-giving illusion, the sense of the clean slate, the I-will-start-all-over-and-this-time-it-is-going-to-be-different. Up to the day that Frederick had sent her to the doctor, she had believed herself indestructible. Now she regarded herself as a brittle piece of porcelain. Between the two of them, they had taught her the fine art of self-pity. “Take it easy,” “Don’t try to do too much,” “You are only human, you know,” “Have a drink or an aspirin, lie down, you are overstrained.” In other words, you are a poor, unfortunate girl who was badly treated in her childhood, and the world owes you something. And there is the corollary: you must not venture outside this comfortable hospital room we have arranged for you, see how homey it is, the striped curtains, the gay bedspread, the easy chair with the reading lamp, why, you would hardly know it was a hospital—BUT (the threat lay in the conjunction), don’t try to get up, you are not strong enough; if you managed to evade the floor nurses, you would be sure to collapse in the street.

  Certainly, Frederick could not have intended this. He had sent her to Dr. James because he was unimaginative, because he believed in science in the same way that as an architect he believed in model tenement houses, and slum-clearance projects, and the Garden City of the Future, which would have straight streets, and lots of fresh air, and parks of culture and rest. When she had wept and cursed and kicked at him, he had not known how to “cope with” her (the phrase was his), and out of timidity, out of a certain sluggishness, an unwillingness to be disturbed, to take too much spiritual trouble, he had done what the modern, liberal man inevitably does—called in an expert. How characteristic of him, she thought, smiling, this great builder of cities, who cannot fix a leaky faucet! Poor Frederick, she murmured to herself, he did not see it in the cards at all that his spirited termagant of a wife would be converted into a whimpering invalid who no longer raged at him so often, who no longer wept every morning and seldom threatened to kill him, but who complained, stood on her prerogatives, and was chronically, vocally tired. And yet … Perhaps he had seen it, and accepted it as a lesser evil to living with her on terms of equality or allowing her to leave him. He was always talking about what he called her “bad record,” a divorce, three broken engagements, a whole series of love affairs abandoned in medias res. Perhaps what counted for him more than anything else, more than love (did he love her, did he know what love was all about?), more than a stable household with a pretty wife across the dinner table, was that this should not happen to him, that no one should be able to say, “Well, she’s done it again.” Furthermore, the fact of her illness, a fact she could not talk away, since she went to the doctor daily, this fact was invaluable to him as a weapon in their disputes. He was always in a position to say to her, “You are excited, you don’t know what you are saying,” “You are not a fit judge of this because you are neurotic,” “We won’t discuss this further, you are not sane on the subject,” and “I don’t want you to see your old friends because they play into your morbid tendencies.” And under the pressure of this, her own sense of truth was weakening. This and her wonderful scruples were all she had in the world, and both were slipping away from her. Overcome by the pathos of her situation, she began to cry.

  Dr. James, who was still talking about castration, stopped in the middle of a sentence.

  “What is it?” he said. “What upset you?” He had his notebook ready.

  “I wasn’t listening,” she said, knowing that this was not quite accurate. She had heard him, but the mind’s time is quicker than the tongue’s. Through the interstices of one of his measured paragraphs her whole life could flood in. “Everything you tell me may be true, but it’s irrelevant. Supposing at a certain time in my life, a time I can’t remember, I found out that girls were different from boys. No doubt this was a very poignant moment, but I can’t go back to it. My horrors are in the present.”

  “But you have never learned to accept that difference.”

  “Ah,” she said, “now you are on Frederick’s side. You think I ought to welcome my womanly role in life, keep up his position, defer to him, tell him how wonderful he is, pick up the crumbs from his table and eat them in the kitchen.”

  “No,” he said, “no. You have a lot to contend with. The marriage is not ideal. It’s unfortunate, for one thing, that you should have chosen to marry exactly the kind of man who would make you feel most enslaved and helpless.”

  “Feel!” she replied indignantly.

  “Well,” he said in his most reasonable and optimistic manner, “you could always get away from him. I think you want to stay with him. I think you are fond of him and that the two of you have the possibility of a solid relationship. Mutual interests … you could have children … you can’t keep on the way you were going, flying from one hectic love affair to another.”

  “No,” she said ruefully, “you can’t.”

  If one only could … But it required strength. It took it out of one so. The romantic life had been too hard for her. In morals as in politics anarchy is not for the weak. The small state, racked by internal dissension, invites the foreign conqueror. Proscription, martial law, the billeting of the rude troops, the tax collector, the unjust judge, anything, anything at all, is sweeter than responsibility. The dictator is also the scapegoat; in assuming absolute authority, he assumes absolute guilt; and the oppressed masses, groaning under the yoke, know themselves to be innocent as lambs, while they pray hypocritically for deliverance. Frederick imagined that she had married him for security (this was one of the troubles between them), but what he did not understand was that security from the telephone company or the grocer was as nothing compared to the other security he gave her, the security from being perpetually in the wrong, and that she would have eaten bread and water, if necessary, in order to be kept in jail.


  To know God and yet do evil, this was the very essence of the romantic life, a kind of electrolytical process in which the cathode and the anode act and react upon each other to ionize the soul. And, as they said, it could not go on. If you cannot stop doing evil, you must try to forget about God. If your eyes are bigger than your stomach, by all means put one of them out. Learn to measure your capacities, never undertake more than you can do, then no one will know that you are a failure, you will not even know it yourself. If you cannot love, stop attempting it, for in each attempt you will only reveal your poverty, and every bed you have ever slept in will commemorate a battle lost. The betrayer is always the debtor; at best, he can only work out in remorse his deficit of love, until remorse itself becomes love’s humble, shamefaced proxy. The two she had cared for most (or was it that they had cared most for her?) had, she believed, understood all this during those last hours when the packed trunks stood about the room and the last pound of butter got soft in the defrosting icebox (it seemed a pity to waste it, but what were you going to do?). They had consoled her and petted her and promised that she would be happy, that she would soon forget them—just as if they had been leaving her, instead of the other way around. The most curious thing about it was that their wounds, whose seriousness perhaps she had exaggerated, had been readily healed by time, while her own, being self-inflicted, continued to pain her. There are other girls in the world, but there is only the single self.

  She remembered Frederick’s impatience when she had tried to explain this to him. “You couldn’t have cared much for him or you wouldn’t have wanted to leave him,” he had said in a grumpy voice. “Really, Frederick,” she had answered, “can’t you possibly understand …?” “By their fruits ye shall know them,” he replied, sententiously. This was one of his favorite quotations, a quotation which, of course, damned her utterly. Yet, she said to herself now, be fair. This is precisely what you want, to be condemned but condemned unjustly, on circumstantial evidence, so that you can feel that there is still some hope for you, that the very illegality of the proceedings against you will advance your cause in some higher court. The prisoner has been under duress; she has been treated with great harshness; let me show you, your honor, the marks of the cat-o’-nine-tails. It was for his incomprehension, his blunt severity, his egoism, that she had married Frederick in the first place. She had known from the very beginning that he would never really love her, and this was what had counted for her, far more than the security or the social position. Or rather perhaps she had felt that she was free to accept these things because the gift of love was lacking. When that man on the train had offered them to her she had had to refuse because love had been offered with them. And yet, she thought, she was being unfair again, for she would never under any conditions have married the man on the train, while there had been something about Frederick (the so-called mutual interests, a certain genuine solidity of character of which the mulishness was only one aspect) that had made her marry him and even believe for a short while that surely it would turn out well, that this time she would be happy and good, that a strong, successful architect was exactly what the recipe called for. An architect, she said to herself scornfully, the perfect compromise candidate, something halfway between a businessman and an artist.

  “What you don’t see, Dr. James, is that I was better then than I am now. You and Frederick do wrong to be so deeply shocked by my past. Why, if I forget to send out his laundry, he can’t resist reminding me of my former sexual crimes. ‘You always were a slut,’ he says.”

  “Come now,” said Dr. James. “Don’t take it so hard. He doesn’t mean everything he says, any more than you do.”

  “Ah,” she exclaimed, sitting up, “but he thinks he does. I still know when I lie, I can recognize a frame-up when I make one. But Frederick is his own stooge, his own innocent front. He has a vested interest in himself. He is the perfect Protestant pragmatist. ‘If I say this, it is true,’ ‘If I do this, it is justified.’ There is no possibility of dispute because Frederick has grace, Frederick belongs to the Elect. It’s the religion of the Pharisee, the religion of the businessman. It’s no accident that Catholicism is the religion of the proletariat and of what is left of the feudal aristocracy. Our principles are democratic; we believe that original sin is given to all and grace is offered with it. The poor man is democratic out of necessity, the nobleman is democratic out of freedom. Have you ever noticed,” she went on, forgetting her quarrel with Frederick, warming up to her subject, “that the unconscious hypocrite is a pure middle-class type? Your aristocrat may be a villain, and your beggar may be a criminal; neither is self-deluded, puffed up with philanthropism and vanity, like a Rockefeller or an Andrew Carnegie. And the French, who are the most middle-class people in the world, have produced a satirical literature that is absolutely obsessed with this vice.”

  Dr. James frowned slightly. It was plain that the subject did not interest him. If only her analysis could be kept on the plane of intellectual discussion! But with Dr. James this was out of the question. Whenever she did manage it, she was sorry almost at once, for, divested of professional infallibility, Dr. James was a pitiable sight. He was no match for her in an argument. It was murder, as they said in the prize ring. And the brief pleasure she got from showing herself to advantage (now he sees me at my best) curdled quickly into self-contempt, as she perceived how abject indeed was her condition, if she could allow this blundering sophomore to get his hands on her beautiful psychology.

  Would she have done better, she wondered, to have gone to one of the refugee analysts, or to one of the older men like Brill? Many of them were intelligent, and they had another merit, they were peculiar. You could see at a glance why psychoanalysis had attracted them. They suffered from migraine, divorced their wives, committed suicide, bullied their patients, quarreled with their colleagues; they were vain or absent-minded or bitter or dishonest—there was hardly a one of whom it could not be said, “Physician, heal thyself.” And popular opinion was wrong when it held that an analyst’s personal failings disqualified him as a healer. Psychoanalysis was one of those specialized walks of life, like the ballet or crime or the circus, in which a deformity is an asset; a tendency to put on weight is no handicap to a professional fat lady; moral idiocy is invaluable to a gangster, and the tragedy of a midget’s life occurs when he begins to grow. What Dr. James and his young American colleagues lacked was, precisely, the mark of Cain, that passport to the wilderness of neurosis that the medical schools do not supply.

  Yet for all their insight and cultivation, the others, the marked men, were dangerous. They might give you their own neurosis; they might neglect you or die or go insane or run away with their stenographers, and then where would you be? With Dr. James you were safe. He might never cure you, but he would not kill you. He would try to make up in conscientiousness and sympathy what he lacked in the other departments. Whatever you did or said, he would be unfailingly kind, and now and then in his blue eyes you would see a small, bright flame of pain, which told you that he was suffering with you, that you were not alone. And if, in many ways, he seemed Frederick’s ideal apostolic delegate (for Frederick would have been afraid to have you go to one of those showy, gifted analysts), if he seemed a symbol of compromise, of the mediocrity you were rapidly achieving, you must forgive him, pretend not to notice, since he was all you had left. Your father was dead, your first husband, your first lover, and your next-to-the-last, even your Aunt Clara. Your other lovers were married, your friends were scattered or disgusted with you or on bad terms with Frederick. One reason, it occurred to her suddenly, that she continued to go to Dr. James long after she had admitted that he could do nothing for her was simply, if the truth were acknowledged, that she had no one else to talk to. Her conversation had become official conversation—the war, the Administration, the Managerial Revolution, Van Wyck Brooks, Lewis Mumford, the latest novel by a friend. Even on these public subjects, Frederick did not like it if she were too “sharp,
” and she could never guess ahead of time whether he would laugh uproariously at one of her jokes or rebuke her for a want of taste. Frederick, she thought, must have known that with all the will in the world she could not transform herself overnight into a “public” character like himself, that a certain amount of isolation was desirable but too much might bring on revolt. Dr. James was the Outlet, paid for by the month, the hygienic pipe line that kept the boiler from exploding.

  “Let’s go back a little,” he said now. “It made you angry when I told you that you felt enslaved. Understand me, I don’t mean that this is a delusion. It’s true that you’ve put yourself in a position that isn’t easy to retreat from. You have gone and burnt all the bridges that could take you back to your old life. But you have done this on purpose.”

  She nodded.

  “I asked for it all right,” she said bitterly. “I haven’t any call to blame Frederick. It’s my own cowardice that got me into this, and it’s my own cowardice that’ll keep me there. Every time I say to myself that I can’t go on, it’s a lie. Or maybe it’s a kind of prayer. ‘Let me not go on.’”