The Company She Keeps (21 page)

Much later, when his career had been achieved, that afternoon assumed for Jim an allegorical significance. Here, surely, had been the turning-point; here the hero had been chastened and nearly laid low; here had been the pit, the mouth of hell, the threat of oblivion, the gleam of redemption. Or, to put it more vaguely, as he did himself, this unfortunate love affair had somehow been “necessary”: he had had to go through it in order to pass on to the next stage of his development. It was like one of those critical episodes in the autobiographies of great businessmen, as ghostwritten for
The Saturday Evening Post
—the moment of destiny when the future E. W. Sears or Frank Woolworth is fired by his employer for daydreaming or incompetence, and thus awakened to the necessity of carving his own niche, a moment the elderly tycoon reverts to in print with tireless gratitude: “If he had not fired me, I would be a clerk today.” In later years, Jim came to have this same kind of feeling about Miss Sargent, and, once, when he was tight at a party, he tried to tell her about it. “Oh, thank you,” she had exclaimed, widening her eyes. “I’ll have a brass plaque made to hang around my neck, saying, ‘Jim Barnett slept here.’” And he had burst out laughing at once, saying, “Ouch” loudly, because there was no real vanity in him.

It was a long time, however, before he took this view of the affair, a long time, indeed, before he could think of it without the most excruciating remorse. The odd thing was that this remorse seemed to have no connection with Nancy. He did not feel that he had betrayed Nancy with the girl in the office; he saw it, in fact, the other way around. He could almost believe that with Nancy and the new baby he was enjoying an idyllic and respectable liaison, while Miss Sargent was the neglected wife. He found that he was avoiding her around the office, fearing a showdown in an empty corridor, fearing equally a kiss or a snub. He came in softly, at odd hours, like a married man in a comic strip creeping up the dark stairs with his shoes in his hand. At the same time, he found that he was trying to appease her politically. At editorial conferences, he began to reveal certain ultra-leftist tendencies; he would make long, earnest speeches, stuttering slightly in the Yale style, and then raise his eyes furtively for her approval. But still she gave no sign, and as time passed and she continued to behave with impenetrable self-possession, as they never met in the elevator or the library, he began to desire the showdown as greatly as he had feared it. Now he arranged occasions to be alone with her; and he was startled to discover, after several failures, that
she
was avoiding
him.
She came to the office late and left early; the telephone operator reported that she was engaged to a new man. Late that summer she went away, out West somewhere, where she came from; it was understood in the office that she was to get up some articles for the paper and at the same time secure her father’s blessing for her second marriage.

As soon as she was gone, Jim felt light and happy again, and the other women in the office told him that he was “more like himself.” He threw himself into the job of getting out a special election supplement. This was the sort of work he was well suited to, for he took the election with intense seriousness, regarding his vote as a sum of money which was not to be invested lightly. Unlike the other members of the staff, who were hysterically predisposed in Roosevelt’s favor, Jim could look at the array of candidates with the impartial sobriety of the ideal consumer attempting to choose between different brands of soap. He was not deceived by labels, and he saw at once that Landon was not a tory, Lemke was not a fascist, Browder was not a communist, and Roosevelt was not a socialist. He was sent to interview each of the candidates, and he wrote a series of informal character sketches that astonished everyone with their perspicacity and good humor. In the end, he decided to vote for Roosevelt, though he had an uneasy feeling about Norman Thomas, whom Mr. Wendell, alone on the paper, was supporting. The war in Spain, however, seemed to clinch the matter; in times like these, a protest vote was a luxury, and that was enough to outlaw it in Jim’s eyes.

He was never sure, afterwards, whether or not it was Miss Sargent’s letter that changed his mind. This was a reply to an election questionnaire the paper had sent out to its contributors; Jim came upon it one afternoon in August. She would vote, she wrote, for the Socialist-Labor candidate, whose name she could not remember—would someone in the office please find out for her? Jim stared at the familiar angular handwriting, and felt himself flush with anger. It must be a joke, he said to himself; it was something she had thought up to annoy the managing editor; in fact she could not even have thought it up for herself; her friend Leo must have egged her on to it. “What a damn silly thing to do!” he exclaimed out loud, and he was tempted to destroy the letter to save the girl’s face. Then suddenly a large sense of chivalry displaced his annoyance: he was determined to protect her from the consequences of her frivolity. He could announce that he was supporting the Socialist-Labor candidate himself, write an article on that tiny, fierce, incorruptible sect. Something might be done about De Leon and the American socialist movement. But almost immediately he realized that the idea was too outlandish; he could not bring himself to cut so fantastic a figure. Why, for God’s sake, couldn’t she vote for Thomas, he muttered, and then it came to him as a happy thought that
he
could vote for Thomas: in some indefinable way this would cover her, make a bridge between her and the rest of the staff.

A fine exhilaration quickly took possession of him, and he perceived that he had wanted to vote for Thomas all along. The Roosevelt bandwagon had been far too comfortable—that fact alone should have been a warning to him. He could predict for himself a long talk with Nancy and a short wrangle with the managing editor, but already he could see the article that would appear in next week’s issue, “Why I Think I’ll Vote for Thomas,” by James Barnett. It would be an honest, dogged, tentative, puzzled article that would invite the reader into the author’s mind, apologize for the furniture, and beg him to make himself quite at home. In the end, the reader might not be persuaded, but he would be able to leave with the assurance that, however he voted, there would be no hard feelings. With each of Jim Barnett’s articles, that, somehow, became the main object. He was like a happy-go-lucky, well-mannered salesman who seems to the prospect delightfully different from other salesmen—as, indeed, he is, since in his eagerness to please he loses sight of his purpose and sells nothing but himself. The born political pamphleteer, like the born salesman, is usually a slightly obnoxious person. Inescapably, Jim had noticed that the two qualities often went together, but it did not appear to him in the light of a general law, but rather as an unhappy accident, a temporary disagreeable state of things which could, with patience, be remedied. And, for a long time, he considered himself the exception which disproved the rule. When it came to him at last that he was not exceptional but irrelevant, when he was, so to speak,
ruled out
as immaterial, having no bearing, incompetent in the legal sense, the shock was terrific.

It was the Moscow trials that made him know, for the first time, that he did not really “belong.” Miss Sargent came into his office one day in the fall with a paper for him to sign. (She was back from the Coast and—mysteriously—no longer engaged to be married.) Clearly, the document in her hand was of deep significance for her, and as Jim read it over, his heart swelled with magnanimity, for he saw that he was going to be able to grant her the first request she had ever made of him, and grant it easily, largely, without a second thought, like a millionaire signing a check for a sister of Charity. The statement demanded a hearing for Leon Trotsky, who had been accused in the trials in Moscow of numberless crimes against the Soviet state. It demanded, also, what it called (rather pompously, he thought) the right of asylum for him. Jim had never believed for a moment that Trotsky was guilty of the charges, and this disbelief remained to the bitter end profound and unshakable. Other people wavered, were frightened or coaxed or bribed to resign from the Trotsky Committee; Trotskyites of long standing would wake sweating in the night to ask, “What if Stalin were right?” but Jim was serene and jocular through it all, and the strength of his skepticism came, not from a knowledge of the evidence, nor a sense of Trotsky’s integrity, nor an historical view of the Soviet Union, but simply from a deficiency of imagination. Jim did not believe that Trotsky could have plotted to murder Stalin, or to give the Ukraine to Hitler, because he could not imagine himself or anybody he knew behaving in such a melodramatic and improbable manner. People did not act like that; it was all like a bad spy picture that you hissed and booed and applauded (ironically) from the gallery of the Hype in New Haven. And indeed the whole Russian scene appeared to Jim at bottom to be the invention of a movie writer; his skepticism included not only the confessions of the defendants but the
fact
of the defendants’ existence. How could there be such people as Romm and Piatakov and the GPU agent, Holtzman? How indeed could there be such a dark and terrible organization as the GPU? It was all so very unlikely. And, in some strange way, Europe itself was unlikely. Jim always had the greatest difficulty in making himself see that Hitler was real, and one reason he had never subscribed to the Popular Front was that whenever he tried to conjure up the menace of fascism, somewhere deep down inside him a Yale undergraduate snickered.

So that it was no problem at all for him to put his signature below Miss Sargent’s. Aside from everything else, there was a purely sporting question involved: you don’t accuse a man without giving him a chance to answer for himself. Of course Trotsky should be heard. He said as much to Miss Sargent and she smiled at him, and their Anglo-Saxon sense of fair play was warm for a moment between them—he could feel it in his stomach like a shot of whisky. All the shame of that other afternoon was gone suddenly, and he thought what a hell of a nice, straight, clear-eyed girl she was, after all.

This sense of recognition, this spiritual handclasp, lasted only an instant, however, for as soon as she began to speak, her words tripped over each other, and he saw, with disappointment, that she was being intense about the matter. She said something about his “courage,” and he reddened and blinked his eyes and twisted his head from side to side, disavowing the virtue. Why, he thought impatiently, was it necessary for Marxists to talk in this high-flown way? There was no question of courage here; it was just a matter of common sense. And he anticipated no trouble. There was never any trouble if you handled these controversies in the right way, kept your head, took it easy, did not let the personal note intrude. It was unfortunate, he had been saying for years, that the radical movement had inherited Karl Marx’s cantankerous disposition together with his world-view. The “polemical” side of Marxism was its most serious handicap; here in America, especially, it went against the grain. He was not so simple as to subscribe to the mythology of the conference table (the class struggle was basic, inadjudicable), but surely on the left itself, there could be a little more friendliness, a little more co-operativeness, a little more give-and-take, live-and-let-live and let-sleeping-dogs-lie. And it was really so easy. Take his own case: he had friends of every shade of opinion, argued with them freely, pulled no punches, but never had a quarrel. There had been the time when he had been obliged to throw a classmate out of his apartment for telling an anti-Semitic story, but the guy had come back the next day, sober, and apologized, and they had shaken hands on it, and the incident was forgotten. It only went to show. Unfortunately, however, the bad side of Marxism was precisely what attracted warped personalities of the type of Miss Sargent, who had long lists of people she did not speak to, and who delighted in grievance committees, boycotts, and letters to the editor. So that the evil multiplied a thousandfold. It was like an hereditary insanity that is perpetuated not only through the genes but by a process of selection in which emotional instability tends to marry emotional instability and you end up with the Jukes family. Or you begin with Marx’s carbuncles and you end with the Moscow trials.

“Take it easy,” he said to the girl, patting her shoulder in token of dismissal.

“I’ll try,” she answered, lightly enough, but as she turned to go, she flung at him that same sad, desperate smile that she had given him on the subway just before—He closed the door hastily behind her. For an instant it was as if he, too, had heard the chord that announces the return of a major theme, a sound heavy with dread and expectation.
It was all going to begin again,
the same thing, disguised, augmented, in a different key, but irrefragably the same thing. His stomach executed a peculiar drop, and this sensation, also, he remembered. It was the feeling you have on a roller-coaster at Coney Island, when the car has just started and you are sitting in the front seat, and you know for sure (you have been wondering up to this moment) that you do not want to ride on it. After the first dip, you lose this certainty (you would unquestionably die if you kept it), you may even enjoy the ride or suggest a second trip, become an
aficionado
of roller-coasters, discriminate nicely between the Cyclone at Palisades Park and the Thunderbolt at Revere Beach. You are, after all, a human being, with a hundred tricks up your sleeve. But at the very beginning you
knew.

However, there seemed at first no cause for alarm. The whole
affaire Trotsky,
as somebody called it, was going off according to schedule. Miss Sargent would come to the office every morning in a fever of indignation: mysterious strangers telephoned her at midnight, she received anonymous letters and marked copies of the
Daily Worker,
a publisher went back on a verbal agreement he had made with her, people cut her on the street, an invitation to a summer writers’ conference had been withdrawn. Jim listened to these stories with a tolerant smile: this was the usual sectarian hysteria. No doubt some of these things had actually happened to her (he would not go so far as to say she had made them up), but certainly she exaggerated, colored, dramatized, interpreted, with very little regard for probability. Nothing of the sort was happening to him. He was on the best of terms with his Stalinist friends, who even kidded him a little about his association with Trotsky; several publishers were after him to do a book; and he got an offer to join the staff of a well-known news magazine. If anything, his open break with the Party had enhanced his value.