The Oasis: A Novel (Neversink)

by Mccarthy, Mary

  “I assume,” he commenced jerkily, with an aborted ‘easiness’ of delivery, “that we’re all friends here. What I’m going to say reflects no criticism on anybody present. We all make mistakes …” A few perfunctory nods acknowledged this preamble; he went on in a more businesslike tone. “Suppose we start with last night …” And he began to rehearse, very much in the manner of an attorney representing a client in a damage suit, the story of Taub’s experience on the mountain-top; the effect on his nerves and sensibility; the traumatic shock he underwent when he imagined himself arrested by a policeman (“Cossacks we used to call them—you can all remember that”); Taub’s radical background; his alienation as an intellectual from the mass-culture of the drugstore and the radio serial. He then went on to describe Joe—a well-intentioned Babbitt, a Boy Scout still living in the escapades of the First War, a useful citizen perhaps, but unfitted for an environment of neurosis. Finally, the broader impact of Joe on the community: the target-practice; broken sleep; the danger to the children; the stove (admittedly an accident); Katy’s hair; her quarrel (if he was not being too personal) with her husband. He looked to Taub for further directives and, receiving none, sat down.

  “The question!” cried Katy. “The question!” She had come prepared for a battle, and could not refrain from pressing her advantage.

  Sidney looked at Taub and both shrugged their shoulders. There was a short silence. Sidney coughed deferentially. “I think Mac has something to say.” “Well,” said Mac, rising to his feet, “I did have a few things on my mind, but you boys …” and suddenly he began waving his arms as if in an uncontrollable fit and laughing, a high, flute-like sound interspersed with patches of helpless choking. “Oh, my God!” he cried. “Will!” Danny Furnas looked up and began to snicker also. In a moment, the room was convulsed. Harold’s giggle soon could be heard, Haines’ deep, husky guffaw, and finally Will’s chuckle, beginning unwillingly and gradually mellowing, as a large foolish smile wreathed his irresolute features in a look of the utmost contentment, in which vanity, chagrin, and relief were indeterminately distributed. His cumbrous thighs spread apart, tightening his ill-fitting duck trousers at the crotch, his bare arms hanging at his sides, his polo-shirt gaping at the neck, he presented a boyish picture of a proud and gratified culprit; the real ingenuousness of his nature sprang into sudden prominence. This man of transparent secrets, caught, as it were red-handed, yielded himself pleasurably to the boisterous humor of his companions, like a small-town kid dragged struggling from his place of concealment during a game of hide-and-go-seek. Only his wife, Cynthia, was immune to the general merriment; she looked coldly down her straight nose at her fellow-Utopians, until she was quite certain that this was all in fun. Her ideas were rather rigid, like those of a royal duchess. She had a firm sense of her husband’s position, and she wished to be assured that there was nothing seditious in this laughter before giving it countenances.

  “And Harold!” Macdougal cried, when he was able to articulate. “That speech!” He laughed again until the tears ran, yet appreciatively, without pettiness, as though paying tribute to a genuine though unconscious work of art. “A great ambulance-chaser was lost in you,” he declared, almost seriously, shaking his red head, and taking Harold by the arm to indicate the kindliness of his feelings. This risibility of Macdermott’s was the crowning and unexpected grace of his character; it was an élan vital, seemingly springing from nowhere, which buoyed him up and translated him into a realm of pure essences, beyond the pedantry of judgment. The targets of his satire could never truly dislike Macdermott, for they found themselves endowed by it with a larger and more fabulous life. Taub and Sidney, now, could not but feel that this laughter left them somehow in an improved position; it reconciled them, to their surprise, with themselves and with others, and permitted them to live down a humiliation whose causes they were reluctant to search for in the duller chambers of blame and excuse.

  Sensible of the change in the atmosphere, Taub retired to the kitchen and came out with whisky and glasses. Someone went to the main house for ice and soda water; Preston Norell fetched wine, and the treasurer took the opportunity to draw Taub aside and ask him for a contribution, a thing he might well have done earlier, had not something ungenerous and straitlaced in his goodness (he was a member of the purist faction) been unwilling to help Taub to extricate himself from a false position. “You should have asked me before, Henry,” Taub remonstrated softly, as he got out his checkbook and in his large, unformed handwriting, scrawled out a medium-sized check. Henry, a tall, thin young man with an ovoid head who resembled a nail-file, felt an immediate rising of irritation; his pride as a functionary was nettled at having negligence ascribed to him when he had merely not exceeded his duty; at the same time, his conscience admitted that the reproof was, in a finer sense, justified. But that he should be made to seem guilty, twice over, once wrongly, once rightly, while Taub remained blandly innocent, infuriated this radical young printer, who was not accustomed to dealing with persons of a certain eminence. He took the wet check, blew on it, and withdrew to a corner of the room, rebuffing a whisky and soda. “Thanks, my wife and I don’t drink,” he declared.

  That evening, nevertheless, marked the beginning of the lyrical phase of the community. The issue of Joe Lockman was allowed to drop, once Editor Haines had contributed “a very sensible suggestion”: that Joe should be requested to hold off the shooting till after breakfast-time. “Do you want that in the form of a motion?” Eleanor Macdermott asked. “No,” everyone cried. “Just let someone speak to him,” and the secretary closed his book without having taken a note, since no official business had been transacted. Later, sitting on the floor, a little apart from the others, Macdermott and John Desmond tried to analyze what had happened to the realist case. “It’s a fundamental weakness of their position,” Macdermott was explaining in a low voice, as if he were passing on a war-secret. “They don’t know what they want. Give them the floor and they’ll hang themselves; I’ve seen it every time.” Desmond, who was very handsome, nodded with a somber face. “Revolutionary nihilism,” he muttered; he was sufficiently new to his recaptured religion to refer every phenomenon to a pronouncement of the Church. “Those boys aren’t revolutionists,” Macdermott whispered scoffingly. “They’re conservatives. They’re so conservative they’re afraid of their own thoughts.” Desmond listened doubtfully, with an evasive hitch of his fine, square shoulders. “The terms need defining,” he declared at last, very softly and thoughtfully. Macdermott coughed. In general, he enjoyed speaking with people who disagreed with him or people less intelligent than himself, but now, still full of his subject, he was in want of a congenial listener. He got up, excusing himself, and went over to Taub, who was standing smoking alone by the fireplace. “Why not Taub?” he said to himself simply. “Say, Will,” he announced, raising a half-playful finger, “I’ve got an idea for you …” And he began to explain to Taub, quite without malice and indeed with the desire to be helpful, just how he and his faction always defeated themselves. Taub listened with interest, nodding slowly as he took in the argument, and moving his lips slightly, repeating Macdermott’s words under his breath, as if storing them for the winter. “You’re all wrong, Mac,” he placidly declared, when he saw that Macdermott had finished. “What?” demanded Macdermott, unable to believe his ears, and beginning to gasp and stutter. “Is that all you have to say?” He felt utterly nonplussed and bewildered, like a suitor rejected without an explanation. Taub gave a confirming nod, and then, with great exactness, crossed two large fingers, held them aloft for attention, and then, having secured Mac’s eye, repeated, with the measured delivery of one who is speaking for history, “You’re all wrong.”

  This was the last open combat to take place between the two leaders. Both emerged from it with a sense of victory, and a sense, also, of wasted time. From then on, discussions between them dealt only with practical matters or with neutral subjects from which no positional inferences need be
drawn. Hopeless each of persuading the other or of dealing a blow which, from the point of view of the receiver, could be recognized as incapacitating, they resigned themselves to their differences and commenced, for want of anything better, to see each other’s good points. A burst of friendship followed this easing of relations, as often happens in love-affairs when two people decide that they do not “mean much” to each other. The practical gain in sociability, in evening-calls, work-sharing, advice offered and taken, was immense. Yet there was no doubt, as the more alert purists began to notice, that the idea of the colony had somehow received a setback. The hope of establishing a Universal to which all men would pay homage was being tacitly set aside in favor of a policy of live-and-let-live. The discovery that one cannot convince an opponent and that it is hopeless to go on trying involves a confession of subjectivity that deprives the world of meaning: the colony, it seemed to the Norells and Leo Raphael, a poet, was losing its raison d’être, if it was no longer a question of converting Taub and his faction to a manifest Truth but simply of getting along with them on a day-to-day basis. Was it really worth while, they asked themselves, to have come all this distance, and invested so much ardor and energy, only to produce what was, in effect, another summer-vacation colony, cooperatively financed? For the regeneration of a soul, a nation, a party, according to the feelings of this group, admission of past error was requisite. The Nuremberg trials and the de-nazification proceedings had demonstrated, a few years before, that it was impossible to impose an awareness of guilt on a man who declines to feel guilty, yet now they could not help but feel a baffled thirst for justice as they watched Taub and his cohorts complacently settle down in Utopia, as though it were their natural preserve.

  For while there was perceptible in the realists the dawn of an ethical attitude, a certain subordination of self to the requirements of the general welfare, an idea, at worst, that here they were answerable for their deeds to someone and not simply to an historical process, which condemned nothing but failure, these symptoms of improvement were unaccompanied by any revision of their official preconceptions or their general outlook on life. These remained intact and indeed untouchable. The happiness they were experiencing during all this month of June, they refused to take into account in formulating a social theory; while turning an old butter-churn or milking a cow by hand, they continued to make the statement that you can’t turn the clock back, as though this postulate were unshakable. Once the colony had won their approval, they began to treat the enterprise as an exceptional case, a weird freak of circumstance, which could not be repeated under any other conditions. Nothing, they insisted, was proved by what was happening here: the weather had been favorable, the personnel carefully chosen; the hotel and its mountain vistas an incomparably lucky find. No lesson, therefore, could be learned here which would have a general application; and in fact the more smoothly the tenor of life began to run, the more they dismissed the colony as being false to the total picture. The ordinary man, they maintained, was incapable of revising his habits to the extent that they themselves were doing, though only a few months before they had maintained the same thing about intellectuals.

  In their refusal to admit that anything was being demonstrated by the experiment, something more than a quibble was involved. There was an aspect of this multiple virtuousness that they found precarious and unsettling. As the days flowed on, and the corn grew in the fields, the hay was got in on time and the cows and the chickens were producing, they became more and more conscious of a sense of unreality, as if they were in a dream or behaving atypically in public. The experience of the age was a phrase to conjure with in their circles; and whatever could be alleged against them, they felt secure at least in their period-authenticity. Now, since the moment of their arrival in Utopia, they had felt cut off from their era, in a very curious way. The wholesomeness of the Utopian life, the success that was rewarding their efforts, the vast scale of the scenery, the good impulses they felt, all seemed to them to lack what they called relevance, to be out of date, like a tone poem or the verse of the Lake minstrels. And so, while responsive to these experiences, they continued to hold them at a certain distance, as if they were not for them. When they said, therefore, that the Utopian lesson had no larger validity, they meant that there was a part of themselves which Utopia did not touch; boredom and urban cynicism had become so natural to them that an experience from which these qualities were absent seemed to be, in some way, defective.

  As the month passed, however, connections with the world were resumed. Visitors came and went; Utopia was written up in the newspapers. A photographer came from Life, and, smiling into the camera, even the doubters experienced that sense of naïve verification that the inexperienced traveler feels when he buys a picture postcard of his hotel and inscribes an x by his room. A hand-press was quickly imported; they had decided to publish a magazine. The work in the fields went on, but since they were not growing for the market, the total labor required from each person amounted to only five hours a day. In the evenings, in the big lounge, by the oil lamps, they began to have lectures and readings from the poets and philosophers. A scene from Moliere was put on. The clergyman held services on Sundays, which were attended mainly out of curiosity. A waterfall was discovered in the forest, and they swam in the pool at its foot, with Taub like a chthonic deity looking on from a rock in his shorts.

  Bicycles were bought; they went on picnics in the neighborhood. The women made bread and cakes; Susan Hapgood had a birthday. They found watercress in the brook, tangled with the pale forget-me-nots. The first young lettuces were eaten, and cauldrons of mustard-greens boiled. And, like a pocket mirror held up at a distance reflecting their own husbandry, far off, across the valley, the fields of the remote farmer altered with the advancing season, but so swiftly that it seemed as if overnight contrasting strips of pale green were laid down, like lengths of carpet on the mountainside, supplanting the dun-brown, and supplanted in turn by lemon-yellows, then golds, then brown again, as a clover-crop was turned under or a field of mustard harvested.

  In the real world, the war still held off: a letter arrived from Monteverdi—he was alive but in hiding. “The only hope,” he wrote them, “is in small insurgent communities, peripheral movements …” Katy Norell wept, with shining St. Joan eyes, as the letter was read aloud on the verandah by Francis, the minister, and the realists averted their glance but maintained a respectful attitude, like unbelievers in a church. “Oh, dear, we haven’t done enough!” cried Katy desperately, when it was finished, banging her knuckles on a table and confronting them all with this self-indictment. It seemed to her that Monteverdi relied on them to spread the message abroad, and that they had failed him by becoming merely self-subsistent; the others, however saddened or thoughtful, felt no impulse to join her in a Domine non sum dignus which, for all its sincerity, had so clearly personal a reference; she was comparing herself, with all her shortcomings and weaknesses, to the great work the letter suggested to her. She wept because she was not perfect. “I don’t know, Katy,” answered Susan, easily. “It seems to me we’ve done mighty well.”

  An unsettled relation existed between these two learned women, in which there was a good deal of rational accord without sympathy. Monteverdi’s letter had not excited Susan, except in so far as it contained good news of himself; his remarks about small groups, peripheral action, et cetera, she found rather unimpressive—naturally, he would put faith in such movements; why not; he was an anarchist. A distrust of libertarian doctrines had stuck with her from her Marxist days. Over a period of years, she had watched her friends, one by one, having made the break from Marxism, plunge with exhilaration into Proudhon and Tolstoy, but her normally curious nature felt no inclination to share an experience so uncorseted. “That side” of the colony made her intelligence squirm, and her silence was a protest which, in her opinion, should have acted as a constraint on others, but which did not at all seem to do so, so that she felt obligated from time to time
to put in an official disclaimer, when she really should have preferred or so she daily assured herself to bracket the matter altogether. She thought that it should have been plain enough to Katy and her associates that she, rather violently, did not wish to “go in” for Monteverdi’s ideas, lest they destroy her liking for him—he himself, in former days, when they used to meet in company, had shown a greater delicacy and seemed, by his shyness, almost to co-operate in her reluctance to having exposed to her the contents of his mind. Susan’s small-town courtesy prompted her to ignore, even in private, what did not bear thinking about. She read Tolstoy, of course, but a certain virginal decorum preserved her from his ideas. “I look on him primarily as a novelist,” she would demur when someone tried to wring from her at least an awareness of his message. Exercising what she considered to be the same charity on behalf of her friends, she strove not to acquaint herself with the details of their enthusiasm, to speak of it, when necessary, as a stage which they would outgrow, or a species of mental illness from which they might recover. Indeed, she hoped that by ignoring it she could make this “phase” pass, and resented the unawareness of the Monteverdians which seemed, on its side, to take no account of her abstentions. “Why, that sounds kind of religious to me,” she would reply uncomfortably if obliged to listen to Katy’s translations of the Founder’s thought; so her own aunt had spoken, doubtfully shaking her head and laying down her sewing, when Susan brought up arguments in favor of racial equality—“Sounds kind of communistic …” Thus the purists’ persistence and the native shrewdness and precaution which made her look anxiously on ideas as something one could catch by contagion had kept her for some time from thinking at all about political questions, which she left now to Taub, whom she considered her intellectual superior, though she disagreed with him sharply in everything that mattered to her most. To Katy, a natural proselytizer readily infected with enthusiasms, Susan’s unwillingness to change masters was a source of continual disappointment. That Susan could remain unmoved by a call so clearly heard by herself, drove her to a teacher’s despair, and her habit of incessant comparison led her at once to inquire whether Susan was not more admirable, for being less facile in feeling, than she was. Anything short of perfect communion depressed Katy, and Susan’s way of taking everything that she said literally, without the liberality that interprets and supplies feeling-tone, made her imagine herself misunderstood and discovered simultaneously; and it was true enough, as a matter of fact, that Susan did not greatly care for Katy, while giving her precisely her due.