Cast a Cold Eye

by Mary McCarthy

  When she woke, it was too early to telephone anyone at an office. She had breakfast and read the help-wanted columns. There was nothing there for her. By ten o’clock her sense of flatness and embarrassment had grown so large that she could not bring herself to telephone anyone who might be able to get her a job. The inevitable question, the Why, stood ahead of her, bristling with condolence and curiosity; she was not ready for it. Better, she said to herself suddenly, to go to an agency, where no personal explanations were required. In ten minutes she was at Rockefeller Plaza, with the list of her qualifications ready on her tongue. But the sight of the Victory garden, the rows of young radishes, made her own garden take shape before her, like a sin she had forgotten to confess. Oh God, oh God, she said to herself, I am unfit—who will hire me? And it seemed to her that she had not gone far enough; she must discard her whole identity. An inspiration seized her: she might hire herself out as a cook. She saw herself, anonymous, in a maid’s room in the third story of a house in Pelham, saw the bed with the thin blankets and the lumpy mattress, the bath shared with the baby, or the lavatory in the basement. All the wretched paraphernalia of domestic service became invested with glamour for her—she might lose herself and be saved. If she were to go down to Fourteenth Street now and buy herself a cheap dress and some shoes, by tonight she might have a situation. She could leave her own clothes in the hotel room, and when he came to find her, he would find merely Bonwit Teller, Mark Cross, hat by John-Frederics, fragrance by Schiaparelli. She was already, in her mind, selecting the shoes for her new life (patent leather with bows which would do for her day out, or sensible, flat-heeled black?), when some part of her, her conscience or her good sense, warned her that it would not do. It was a child’s dream of revenge (see to what lengths you have driven me). Regretfully, she relinquished the adventure.

  Yet, she said to herself, I must do something; by tomorrow I shall be out of money. In her handbag were the few pieces of jewelry she had inherited from her mother. It occurred to her that this was perhaps the moment to sell them; after lunch, with cash in her pocket, she could approach the agencies with more assurance. She walked briskly up toward Fifty-ninth Street, feeling herself lifted once again by that wave of exultation that had brought her down from the country. She was free again, if only for a few hours; all decisions, commitments, were postponed. It was as though the old-gold and diamond shop which she entered presently were the last station in her flight; passing the jewelry over the counter, she divested herself of her last possession; the appraiser counted her out a hundred dollars, and she no longer had anything to lose. She stuffed the money into her pocketbook and hurried back to the hotel.

  At the desk, however, she found a message, breaking her lunch date and asking her to call back. At once, her elation vanished. The day stretched empty ahead of her. She turned quickly back to the street and found a Hamburger Heaven, where she ate lunch. Afterward, she went to the movies, and when she returned to her room she did not telephone anyone, but lay on her bed reading the Gospel according to St. Matthew until she felt it to be late enough to go to sleep. She had eaten no dinner. The third day passed off in much the same way: again the movies, and at night the Bible.

  On the morning of the fourth the telephone waked her, and she knew at once that it would be he. “Well,” he said, “I found you.” “Yes,” she said. “It wasn’t so hard.” “No,” he replied shortly. “Will you come down and have breakfast with me?” “No.” “Oh, go to hell,” he retorted, and hung up. When he called up that night, he was not sober, and it was she who hung up. She had seen nobody since her arrival. Since the first night she had eaten nothing but hamburgers, and sandwiches at drugstore counters. Notice of any sort had become painful to her: she was unequal to a headwaiter or a desk clerk; she passed in and out without leaving her key; she felt both conspicuous and obscure. She had gone to a single employment agency and filled out an application. Outside the door, she realized that she had forgotten to note down her previous experience, but she could not go back. She was hiding and waiting, both for him and for someone else, some friend or stranger who would come to help her in response to an appeal she had never made. She was living in a state of peculiar expectation, as though she had put an ad in the newspaper, an ad of the most total purport, which God perhaps might answer, and the message she daily expected to find, written out in the hotel’s violet ink and shoved under her door, was not of an ordinary social nature.

  Yet this sense of expectancy, of extravagant, unreasonable hope, had for its corollary during these days a strange will-lessness, an attitude of resignation and despair. She knew that it was absolutely necessary that she should bestir herself; her money would soon run out and she would be locked out of her hotel room. Yet she found that she actually looked forward to this catastrophe as a means of release; the credit manager might yet be the Saviour, who, as holy legend tells us, appears in strange disguises. She was, it seemed to her now, utterly at the mercy of chance: a notice of eviction might precipitate her future out of the solution in which it was suspended—she herself was powerless. In her present state, even her flight appeared to her to have been an act of supreme daring; she could not imagine how she could have summoned up the firmness of character to do it. In fact, she said to herself, if she could have foreseen the outcome, she would never have taken the last drastic step, but held it forever in reserve, a threat and a promise—and died, after thirty years of marriage, thinking how different her life might have been had she left him. What folly, she cried, what madness! She had exchanged the prison of the oppressor for the prison of the self, and from this prison there was not even the hope of escape. At six o’clock Thursday evening, she had not decided what to wear for dinner, a long dress or a short. She put two dresses on the bed, but the arguments for each were unanswerable, and at six-thirty she went out and walked until she found a Western Union office, where she sent a telegram of excuse to her hostess, knowing, as she did so, that she was cutting her last line of communication to the world, to the past, to the future.

  Yet when he had not called her again by the morning of the sixth day, a faint hope began to ruffle her spirit, like a sea breeze on an August afternoon. If he had given up and returned to the country, something might still be salvaged. She had seen her resolve melt away in these long mornings in the hotel room, and she knew that she was no longer proof against him; if he were to summon, she would obey. With the dissolution of her belief in herself, her case against him had collapsed. Yet, if he were to abandon her, she knew that she would endure, simply because, physically, she was alive and possessed of a certain negative fortitude. Eventually she would go out, she would telephone, get a job, and gradually circumstances would knit a new web around her, as scar tissue will form over a wound, even if the surgeon has not been called to take the proper stitches.

  On this sixth day, as the morning passed on and the telephone still did not ring, she felt her spirits rise and an almost forgotten gaiety take possession of her. Surely he must be gone, she said to herself, and now I am really up against it and perhaps it will be fun after all…The sense of being under surveillance was passing off, and she dressed quickly, in her best white dress, black shoes, and large black cartwheel hat. Nothing, she told herself confidently, is more urban than black and white in summer. It was three o’clock and she had had nothing to eat, but the emptiness of her stomach only added to her fine sense of lightness and bravery. The sound of her heels on the stone floor near the elevator was brisk and pleasing, she let her handbag swing gallantly on her bare, tanned arm. For the first time, on pressing the button, she knew precisely where she was going—to call on an old friend who had an important job in an advertising office—and she knew, furthermore, that it was going to be all right, that he would compliment her and take her out to cocktails at a nice place, and that there, over the second drink, an opening would come which would allow her to tell him, quite naturally, quite easily, that she had left her husband. When he would press her—gently
—for a reason, it would be merely a question of finding the right formula, of avoiding vindictiveness on the one hand and piety on the other, of packing the truth into some assimilable capsule which her companion could swallow without any noticeable discomfort. As the elevator descended, a sentence spoke itself for her (I would have left him long ago if it hadn’t been for those damned petunias). This was the right note, she recognized at once, seeing in advance the effect it would make in her friend’s face, where the struggle between incredulity and belief would resolve itself in laughter. She foresaw a whole train, a lifetime, of these sentences. (But you say you left him five days ago; what have you been doing ever since? I’ve been lying in my hotel room reading the Gideon Bible.) She smiled, feeling herself on home territory. She was back at her port of embarkation, which she had set forth from five years before, back to her native patois, where jest masks truth but does not deny it.

  The elevator doors opened and she saw her husband sitting in the lobby.

  Two days later, he unlocked the door of the house and gave her a slight shove forward, as though she were a dog or a truant child. Her first impression was that the house had in a week grown older and shabbier. She stood in the doorway of the living room, looking about her with the eyes of an observant stranger. She noted the paint peeling on the window frames, the place where the wallpaper had been patched and the stripes did not quite meet, the blue chair that had never belonged there in the-first place, the stain where her own head had rested on the back of the sofa. Two rather tacky-looking bouquets of bridal wreath stood on the marble-topped coffee table which she had cut down from an old piece; very plainly, they said Welcome Home in the floral language of her maid. Generally, when this kind of thing happened to her, when a room or the face of a lover did not measure up to memory, she would narrow her eyes, as she did to look at herself in the mirror, till the focus had changed and the image become a little blurred; then, with the quick hand of fancy, she would bestow a few decorations on the object—a bowl of flowers, a glass cigarette box—a look of irony, or a smile; and in a few moments all would be well, the face or the room would have subsided, and her eyes, now wide open, could run over it with love. This time, however, though she narrowed her eyes out of force of habit, nothing of the sort happened; the room became dimmer but it did not reassemble itself. “Well,” said her husband, rather heartily, in his business-as-usual tone, “everything looks the same.” This statement came in so patly that she made the mistake, fatal in marriage, of speaking to him as an intimate. “Does it?” she asked. “Really? It looks queer to me. The colors look as if somebody had mixed black in them. Do you suppose she has changed the light bulbs?” “Don’t be silly,” he said, sweeping her ahead of him toward the staircase. “Why should she do that?” “Let’s have dinner right away,” he added, pushing her slightly again, as though he had expected her to express some morbid and contradictory wish. She obeyed him, mechanically, as she had done ever since she had seen him sitting in the hotel lobby. Her defeat seemed to her shameful and absolute. Fortunately, however, her feelings had died in her; there was no rebelliousness, no resentment—in the conquered country, the officials conferred quietly with the captors and the underground movement slept.

  What troubled her all evening was merely the notion that something had happened to the lighting. Across the table in the dining room, she could barely see her husband’s face, though the customary twelve candles were burning. In the middle of the meal, she excused herself and got up to turn on the electricity. This was not an improvement; now her husband’s face appeared to be unnaturally white. The food also seemed to her to have been tampered with. Her husband was eating with apparent relish; still, she could not disabuse herself of the idea that there was something wrong—perhaps the maid had forgotten to put the sherry in the stew? “You are tired,” said her husband warningly, and she accepted this explanation with gratitude. After dinner, nevertheless, she could not restrain herself from going around to each of the lamps to see if there might be dust on the bulbs. But her finger came off clean.

  In the morning, the visual derangement persisted. Her eye was caught, on waking, by a window shade which had been white when she had gone to New York; this morning it was certainly ivory. Slightly frightened, she closed her eyes and took refuge in sleep. When she woke, it was to the light sound of the glass bell calling her to lunch, and to an instant conviction of disaster. There was something wrong, something she had forgotten, something more than the persistent queerness of the light or the fact of her being back once again in her husband’s bed. But her memory would not yield it up until, during a pause in the lunchtime conversation, she happened to glance out the window and saw on the sill the boxes containing the dead petunias. Her husband heard her gasp and his eyes followed hers. “What’s the matter?” he said. “Nothing,” she replied. “Something I remembered.” He did not pursue the topic, and later, when he asked the question (“Have you been out yet to look at your garden?”), she perceived, with relief, that he was unaware of its significance. For him the question was a mere token of politeness, a bone tossed to the idiosyncrasies of her taste. He was still going through the motions of treating her, rather nervously, as a guest, but his heart was plainly not in it, for he did not trouble to wait for her answer.

  For her, however, the question had a more fateful sound. She knew at once that she ought at least to go out and look, yet she put it off, for a day, for two days, while she did nothing but lie on her bed, declining to go to the market, plan the meals, make the French dressing, sleeping from time to time, as she had done in the hotel, and waking always with that terrible start of knowledge that tells us, as we come out of ether or alcohol, that something has changed in our lives, though we are not yet sure what it is. If her husband’s question had not been repeated a second and a third time, she might never, she told herself, have made the nearly unbearable effort that took her into the toolshed for her trowel and cultivator and sent her slowly down the garden path to the enclosure in the fields. But the third time his question had had an anxious perplexity in it. Her avoidance of the garden had begun to seem to him abnormal; his mind must be set at rest. For (it had become more and more apparent) he had no comprehension at all of the events of the past week. He imagined that the whole affair was a sort of triumph, that he, the conquerer, guardian of the hearth, had pursued the fugitive nymph and wooed and bullied her home by the sheer force of his will. It had not occurred to him for an instant that the collapse was interior, that, like France, she had fallen, limp, corrupt, disgraced, into the arms of the victor, and so long as he did not perceive this, she had a little bargaining power left. But for the preservation of the illusion, it was necessary that he should believe her unchanged, should have no suspicion of the docility that placed her, not only at his mercy, but at the mercy of every event. Her long hours in her room she had excused on the grounds of emotional exhaustion, but this could hardly be expected to last forever. Already he had begun to look a little critically at the meals, to run a finger over a table that had not been dusted—the holiday, his voice indicated, was over. And now, as she passed his window, she knew that the sound of her footsteps were reassuring to him; it signified the return to normalcy, the resumption of hostilities.

  The garden had waited too long, she warned herself; she was too late. Common sense alone could tell you what you might expect to find if you left a garden alone for ten moist days in June. She was prepared for the worst. Yet halfway down the path apprehension gave place to hope, and she began to run, as though this final burst of speed could make up for a long tardiness, as though she might catch the garden in the moment of transformation, effect a last-minute rescue in the very teeth of probability. The garden, however, was gone. Her first impression was that it had disappeared without a trace. In ten days the weeds had swallowed it. The brown enclosure had turned green; the very markers that indicated the rows had vanished, and of the whole enterprise only the fence remained, an absurd testimonial to the fact
that this rectangle had been, at one time, the scene of human endeavor. With the first shock, she closed her eyes: this was the nightmare vision she had wrestled with all spring, a ferocious tableau vivant entitled The Triumph of the Weeds, which had appeared again and again to halt her on the road to freedom, to harrow her susceptibilities and appeal to her pity and love. She had turned back before it a hundred times, and when at length she had hardened her heart, she had told herself, I will not be there to see it. Now, however, it was all as she had imagined it, except that the season was not so far advanced and she was here in the midst of it, while the hot furnished room was distant beyond desire. When she opened her eyes again, it was not with the hope of finding some mitigating circumstance, but rather with a kind of morbid appetite to embrace the full details of her disaster. Now she made out the individual weeds, and she saw that while in the field outside there were buttercups and a few daisies already open, here, in her enclosure, flourished only the most virile, the most virid, the most weedlike weeds, the coarse growers—burdock, thistle, milkweed, Queen Anne’s lace; the crawlers—carrotweed, Jill-run-over-the-ground, and especially the choking nut grass, which crawled beneath the earth’s surface and sprouted fiercely above it. No doubt, she said to herself, there was some natural explanation for this—the rankest weeds were perhaps the strongest and their seeds had a longer viability—yet common sense would not prevail; her heart accepted the phenomenon as a judgment and a curse.

  It is hopeless, she murmured to herself, leaning against the fence, hopeless; and for the first time her spirit made an acknowledgment of defeat that was not provisional in character. Up to this moment there had been in her mind small recesses of hope to which her thoughts had fled secretly, unavowedly; in her contract with reality, an escape clause which permitted her to believe that what had been done was not irretrievable, that—in this case—dry weather might have retarded the weeds or some magic helper hoed for her (her maid, a thoughtful neighbor, a small boy employed by her husband?); now solidly before her lay the brutal fait accompli, the lost garden, irrecoverable, for though something might still be salvaged (a few gray cornflower plants could be made out in the mat of vegetation at her feet), the original design, the mirror of absolute beauty in which she had glimpsed her own image, was shattered. She sank listlessly to the ground and sat looking about her. Quite simply a sentence came to her and she spoke it aloud: “Now,” she said, “I have nothing to live for.”