The Company She Keeps

by Mary McCarthy

  “Wait!” He sustained a dramatic pause. In this moment he was very much the magician. Behind him you could see Mesmer and then Cagliostro, the whole train of illusionists, divine, disreputable charlatans, who breathe on the lead coin, and, lo, it is purest gold. In spite of herself, she felt a little excited. Her hands trembled, her breathing quickened. She was ready for the mystery. “I am going to suggest to you a different view of your marriage.” He paused again. Now she hung ardently on his words. She would have liked a cigarette, but she was afraid to reach for her pocketbook, lest the movement disturb him. She held her body perfectly still, like a woman who is expecting that any minute now the man by her side will kiss her.

  “Yes?” she said in a soft, weak voice.

  “You accuse yourself every day of having done something cowardly in marrying your present husband. I want to suggest to you that the exact opposite may be true, that this marriage took more real daring on your part than anything you have done since you left your father’s house.”

  “You’re crazy,” she said, mildly.

  “No!” he declared. “Think! In your childhood you had a terrible experience. Your mother died and you found yourself the prisoner of a cruel and heartless relative.”

  “She wasn’t really cruel,” she protested. “She was just misguided.”

  “I am talking about the way it appeared to you. Your aunt was the wicked stepmother that you read about in the fairy tales. Now where could you turn for help? To your father, obviously. But your father refused to help you. He even refused to notice that anything was wrong.”

  “He was away a great deal.”

  “That was what you told yourself. You began by trying to excuse him, but all the time you had the feeling that there was something queer going on, something you couldn’t understand. Maybe your father and your aunt had a horrible covenant between them, maybe your own subjection was somehow part of the deal.”

  He is trying to imitate the way I talk, she thought, but it sounds silly when he does it.

  “At the same time, you suspected that you would have been treated differently if you were a boy. You’ve described the arrangement of your house to me, and you lived in a kind of harem. Your father never went into your bedroom. You began to think that there was something ugly about being a girl and that you were being punished for it.”

  “Yes. There was something odd there. It seems to me now that my father felt that he had committed a sexual crime in marrying outside the clan. Race pollution. That was why he was so strict with me about boys. He wouldn’t let me walk down the street—in broad daylight—with a boy I’d known all my life. The temptations of the flesh must have seemed very lively to him.”

  “We can’t go into your father’s psychology here. Something like that probably happened. In any case, you were made to feel unclean about your sex. And your religion got into the picture. You compared the upstairs with the downstairs.”

  Ah, yes, she thought, you are right. The terrible female vulgarity of blood, the Sacred Heart dripping gore, Saint Sebastian with the arrows, the dark red of the votive lamps, and the blue robe of the Madonna, the color of the veins in one’s wrists. How schematically it had all been lived out, the war between the flesh and the spirit, between women and men, between the verminous proletariat and the disinfected bourgeoisie.

  “You thought that you belonged with your Aunt Clara, that you were a dark, disgusting person, and that your father, though you could not acknowledge this, was the real jailer.”

  “I see,” she said. “And I felt that I deserved my imprisonment, that my father in segregating me from the community was performing a social service, throwing a cordon sanitaire around a slum section that was full of typhus.”

  It was all true. Yet there had been some ambiguity in the situation, arising from the fact that she was, after all, her father’s daughter. Yet this element, far from easing her lot, had made it the more intolerable. The ugly duckling might be able to get along in life, adjust, resign itself, if there were not the charming, tantalizing possibility that at any moment it might turn into a swan. And, of course, that was what had happened. The second transformation had been quite as magical as the first. The little girl who looked like her mother had suddenly reappeared, seven years older, but otherwise unchanged. Or so, at any rate, it had seemed. She was pretty, she dressed expensively, she was gay, she made friends, and the only remarkable thing about her was that she had the air of coming from nowhere, of having no past. Her classmates in boarding school could not understand why they had never met her before. When they asked her about this, she would blush and say that her father had kept her in a convent. But this explanation was never quite adequate. “What about vacations?” they would wonder. “Who did you go around with?” “Oh, a lot of Catholic girls,” she would answer. “It was very boring.” Questions of this sort annoyed her, for she was anxious to think of herself as a completely new person. If anyone would have believed her, she would have pretended that she had spent her former life in some different, distant city, where she had gone to dancing class every Tuesday and been just like everyone else. Unfortunately, her father was too well known; her lie would have been discovered. In a way, she supposed, it was to escape from these questions, from the whole unfair business of having to have a verifiable history, that she had gone East to college. There, if you had money and used the right fork, no one could suspect an Aunt Clara in your vague but impeccable background. Later, when she had grown more sophisticated, Aunt Clara had been converted into an asset. It was amusing to have an aunt who said “ain’t” and “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” and ate her peas with a spoon, amusing because it seemed so improbable that you could have an aunt like that.

  Moreover, the change had not been merely superficial. Her whole character had altered, or, rather, she had believed that it had. She, who had spent seven years in crying fits, spent the next seven without shedding a tear. Where her artistic tastes had been romantic, they quickly became realistic. Everything she had formerly admired became detestable to her. The sight of a nasturtium or a pink cosmos could make her tremble with anger, though these were the very flowers that, at her aunt’s suggestion, she had chosen to grow as a child. Most extraordinary of all, she had suddenly developed wit and, even now, she never failed to be surprised when people laughed at her jokes, because for years it had been a household axiom that poor Meg had no sense of humor.

  How remarkable it had all been! How very strong she had felt! She used to think back over her childhood and marvel, telling herself that it was really extraordinary that “all that” had not left a single trace. Yet as soon as she had married for the first time, she had begun to change back again. The first time she cried, she had said to herself, “This is very strange. I never cry.” The first time she got angry with her husband and heard a torrent of abuse pour from her own lips, she had listened to herself in astonishment, feeling that there was something familiar about the hysterical declamatory tone, something she could not quite place. It happened again and again, and always there was this sense of recognition, this feeling that she was only repeating combinations of words she had memorized long ago. She had been married some time before she knew that she sounded exactly like Aunt Clara. Yet she could not stop, she was powerless to intervene when this alien personality would start on one of its tirades, or when it would weep or lie in bed in the morning, too wretched to get up. And when it began to have love affairs, to go up to strange hotel rooms, and try to avoid the floor clerk, she could only stand by, horrified, like a spectator at a play who, as the plot approaches its tragic crisis, longs to jump on the stage and clear up the misunderstanding, but who composes himself by saying that what is happening is not real, those people are only actors.

  “This isn’t like you, Meg,” her first husband would tell her, in that gentle voice of his, and she would collapse in his arms, sobbing, “I know, I know, I know.” She was inconsolable, but he could almost console her, since he shared her own incredulity
and terror. It was as if she had lent her house to a family of squatters and returned to find the crockery broken, the paneling full of bullet-holes, the walls defaced with obscenities, her beautiful, young girl’s bedroom splashed with the filth of a dog. And it was as if he had taken her hand and said, “Don’t look at it. Come away now. Everything will be just the same; we will send for the cleaning woman, the house painter, and the restorer. Don’t cry, it has no connection with you.” She was glad to believe him, naturally. Nevertheless, before long, she began to think him a fool. At the outset, it had seemed to her that he was right, that she was being impersonated by some false Florimel; however, as time went on, she herself became confused. She was losing the thread of the story, which was getting fearfully involved, like one of those Elizabethan dramas in which the characters change their disguises so often (Enter the Friar disguised as a Friar) that the final unmasking leaves everyone more perplexed than before. She came at last to the place where she wondered whether the false self was not the true one. What if she were an impostor? The point could only be settled by producing the false self in all its malignancy, and asserting its claim to belief. To say, “You were wrong about me, look how dreadfully I can treat you, and do it not impulsively but calmly, in the full possession of my faculties.” Her first husband, however, had not been convinced. (And how could he be, she thought now; it was far easier for him to believe in her innate, untarnishable virtue than to believe that for three years he had been the dupe of what her present husband called a natural-born bitch.) He had grieved over her and let her go, remarking only that her fiancé would never understand her as he did, that she must be out of her senses.

  At once she was restored to herself. She knew that she did not cry or make disgusting scenes or have cheap tastes or commit adultery (unless she were very much in love). Yet whenever a new love affair grew serious the usurper would crowd in again. Each time she would persuade herself that with this particular man her defenses would be impregnable, and each time the weak point, the crumbling masonry, would be discovered too late, when the enemy was in occupation. And she would reflect sadly that of course she ought to have realized that this one was too selfish, that one too lazy, the other too pliant to permit her being herself, though actually it was these very qualities that she had relied upon for protection. And unfortunately she had used very little realism in her selections. She was not in a position to ask herself any of the conventional questions (are our tastes congenial, will he be able to support me, will I still want to sleep with him after the first few weeks?) because precisely what she dared not look into was the Medusa-face of the future. “I will have to take a chance,” she would always say, and her friends, marveling at her recklessness, did not see that she was exactly as gallant as a soldier who moves forward flourishing the standard, because he knows that if he does not do so, his officers will shoot him in the back.

  “Now,” said Dr. James, “you were helpless, you had no one to turn to, not even the Juvenile Court. And yet …” He paused again, even more impressively. This is the moment, she said to herself. This time surely he will get that rabbit out of the hat. “You won your freedom. And the thing to remember, Margaret,” he pronounced her full name with all its syllables, “is that you did it yourself!” His voice was full of triumph.

  “Perhaps,” she said sadly. “But I can’t do it again.”

  “I think you can,” he answered. She felt belief stir, faintly, fondly, within her. It would be nice if he were right. However, the whole tone of his address was so deplorably YMCA. “I think you can,” he repeated. “The very fact of your marriage indicates that you can.”

  She looked up at him. At last he had surprised her.

  “Let me suggest to you, Margaret, that this ordeal of your childhood has been the controlling factor of your life. You forgot it, blotted it out of your consciousness, just as you blotted your aunt out of your family history, yet you have never ceased to think about it for a single moment. You did not understand how you had escaped, you could never really believe that you had. Everything that happened afterwards seemed unreal to you, like a story, but you disguised this from yourself by turning everything upside down, by pretending that your childhood was the fantasy, the thing that never took place. Nevertheless, as you grew older, as you found yourself able to get along, to graduate with honors, have friends and a husband and a job, as you began to feel more secure in your role, the past reasserted itself. This could not have taken place earlier because you were still too frightened. When it did come out, however, it expressed itself in various ways, not all of them bad. It expressed itself in neurotic symptoms, but also in your political beliefs, in a taste for colorful language that has been useful to you as a writer. It expressed itself in what you call emotional greediness, which has done you good as well as harm.

  “As soon as the past showed itself, you tried to run away. At the same time you set yourself various tests to find out what you were like. None of the results appeared to be conclusive, though, because the tests did not seem to you real. What you were being drawn toward all the time was a re-enactment of the old situation, but your first marriage and your other relationships fulfilled practically none of the conditions that had prevailed in your father’s house. And the essential thing was lacking: you felt free; you were an equal; you could always get away. You say that you were happier in these relationships. In the end, though, they proved unsatisfactory. You dropped them abruptly. However, as you got older and—you must not forget this—stronger, you began to choose men who more nearly resembled your father. A middle-aged man, married men, even, once, a New Englander who came from your father’s home state.”

  “That was nothing,” she said. “A flash in the pan. One afternoon.”

  “Yes. All these affairs are mere signposts of a direction. Finally, however, your father dies, and you are free to make a real marriage. You at once marry Frederick and imitate, as much as it’s possible for a grown woman, your own predicament as a child. You lock yourself up again, you break with your former friends, you quit your job; in other words, you cut yourself off completely. You even put your money in his bank account. You are alone: if you cry out, no one will listen; if you explain, no one will believe you. Frederick’s own weaknesses contribute to this picture; they affirm its reality. His own insecurity makes him tyrannical and over-possessive; his fear of emotional expenditure makes him apparently indifferent. On the one hand, he is unjust to you, like your aunt; on the other, like your father, he pretends not to notice your sufferings and to deny his own culpability in them. Religion appears again, but now (this is very significant) it is the Protestant religion. A doctor enters the scene. If I remember rightly, you say that the only time your father came into your bedroom, he was bringing a doctor with him.”

  She nodded, unable to speak.

  “You reproach yourself with cowardice for having contracted this marriage. But look at the facts. Isn’t this the most dangerous action you have ever performed as an adult? You have run a terrible risk, the risk of severe neurosis, in putting yourself to this test. For that’s the thing you are asking: will I be able to get out? And once again you have the answer in yourself.”

  “No, I haven’t,” she said. “I’m turned to water. I’m finished. I’m overrun by barbarian tribes. Two or three years ago, perhaps … Not now.”

  “Two or three years ago, Margaret,” he said gently, “you wouldn’t have had the courage to put yourself in this situation, let alone to save yourself.”

  “It’s not true. I was wonderful then.”

  He smiled.

  “In those days, you were avoiding the things you feared. Now you are eating breakfast with them.”

  “Not eating breakfast,” she said. “Frederick prefers to breakfast alone. I disturb his train of thought.”

  “The weakness you feel is a result of living with these fears. You must find your way out, and you’ll discover that you are just as strong as Frederick.”

  “Bu
t what can I do? He won’t allow me to leave him. I have nobody left to borrow money from. I could run away and sleep on a park bench, I suppose.”

  But she did not want that. Ah, no! The days of romantic destitution were gone for her. It was no longer possible for her to conceive of herself as a ribbon clerk at Macy’s. Now there was not so much time left in the world that you could spend two years or three in the unrewarding occupation of keeping yourself alive. Her apprenticeship was finished. If she took a job, it would have to be a good one, one that would keep the talents limber. No more secretarial work, no more office routine, that wonderful, narcotic routine that anesthetizes the spirit, lulls the mind to sleep with the cruel paranoiac delusion of the importance, the value to humanity, of the humble-task-well-done.

  “You tried running away as a little girl, and it didn’t work,” he said. “No. You misunderstand me. I’m not advising you to leave Frederick. You must win your freedom from him, your right to your opinions, your tastes, your friends, your money. And, of course, your right to leave him. Once you have it, I believe, you will cease to want to exercise it. You can become truly reconciled with Frederick, and you may even be happy with him.”

  “It sounds impractical,” she said. “How am I going to get these rights?”

  “You did it before,” he answered. “You did it with your mind. That and your beauty are the two weapons you have.”

  He closed his black notebook.

  “All right!” he announced in a totally different voice, high and unnaturally sprightly, as if he were giving a bird imitation. The hour was over. She looked at the electric clock. He had given her five minutes extra. This pleased her, and she was ashamed of being pleased over such a small, such a niggardly present. What a pass indeed she had come to when the favors of this commonplace little doctor could be treasured, like autumn leaves in a memory book! The knife of terror struck at her, and she saw herself as a transient, and this office with its white walls as the last and bleakest hotel room she would ever lie in. Guests who stay after one P.M. will be expected to pay for the extra day. When she was gone, he would empty the ash tray, smooth out the white cloth on the pillow, open the window for an instant, and the room and he would be blank again, ready for the next derelict. She put her hat on carefully, trying not to hurry, lest he see how humble and rejected she felt, how willing to be dislodged; and trying, on the other hand, not to take too much time, lest he think her inconsiderate. He picked up her coat from the end of the couch and held it out for her, an attention he rarely paid her. She glanced at him and quickly lowered her eyes. Does he think I am unusually upset today, she wondered. Or was it something else? “My beauty,” she murmured to herself. “Well, well!” She slid her arms into the coat. She turned, and he offered her his hand. In slight confusion, she shook it. “Good-bye,” she said softly. He patted her arm. “Good-bye. See you tomorrow,” he said in a rather solicitous voice. He held the door open for her and she slid out awkwardly, half-running, not wanting him to see her blush.