The Company She Keeps (30 page)

“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.”

“But 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.

On the street, she felt very happy. “He likes me,” she thought, “he likes me the best.” She walked dreamily down Madison Avenue, smiling, and the passers-by smiled back at her. I look like a girl in love, she thought; it is absurd. And yet what a fine rehabilitation of character that had been!
The most dangerous action … runs a terrible risk.
She repeated these phrases to herself, as if they had been words of endearment.
I think you can …
Suddenly, her heart turned over. She shuddered. It had all been a therapeutic lie. There was no use talking.
She knew.
The mind was powerless to save her. Only a man … She was under a terrible enchantment, like the beleaguered princesses in the fairy tales. The thorny hedge had grown up about her castle so that the turrets could hardly be seen, the road was thick with brambles; was it still conceivable that the lucky third son of a king could ever find his way to her? Dr. James? She asked herself the question and shook her head violently. But supposing he
should
fall in love with her, would she have the strength to remind herself that he was a fussy, methodical young man whom she would never ordinarily have looked at? All at once, she remembered that she had not told him the end of her dream.

She was matriculating at a place called Eggshell College. There was an outing cabin, and there were three tall young men, all of them a sort of dun color, awkward, heavy-featured, without charm, a little like the pictures of Nazi prisoners that the Soviet censor passes. They stumbled about the cabin, bumping their heads on the rafters. She was sorry she had gone there, and she sat down at a table, resolved to take no part in the proceedings. Two other girls materialized, low-class girls, the kind you said, “Hello, there” to on the campus. A sort of rude party commenced. Finally one of the men came toward her, and she got up at once, her manner becoming more animated. In a moment she was flirting with him and telling one of the other girls, “Really he is not so bad as the others. He is quite interesting when you begin to talk to him.” His face changed, his hair grew dark and wavy. There was something Byronic about him. He bent down to kiss her; it was a coarse, loutish kiss. “There must be some mistake,” she thought. “Perhaps I kissed the wrong one,” and she looked up to find that the Byronic air was gone; he was exactly like the others. But in a few minutes it happened again; his skin whitened, his thick, flat nose refined itself, developed a handsome bridge. When he kissed her this time, she kept her eyes shut, knowing very well what she would see if she opened them, knowing that it was now too late, for now she wanted him anyway.

The memory of the dream struck her, like a heavy breaker. She stopped in the street, gasping. “Oh my God,” she demanded incredulously, “how could I, how could I?” In a moment, she told herself that it was only a dream, that she had not really done that, that this time at least she need feel no remorse. Her thirsty spirit gulped the consoling draft. But it was insufficient. She could not disown the dream. It belonged to her. If she had not yet embraced a captive Nazi, it was only an accident of time and geography, a lucky break. Now for the first time she saw her own extremity, saw that it was some failure in self-love that obliged her to snatch blindly at the love of others, hoping to love herself through them, borrowing their feelings, as the moon borrowed light. She herself was a dead planet. It was she who was the Nazi prisoner, the pseudo-Byron, the equivocal personality who was not truly protean but only appeared so. And yet, she thought, walking on, she could still detect her own frauds. At the end of the dream, her eyes were closed, but the inner eye had remained alert. She could still distinguish the Nazi prisoner from the English milord, even in the darkness of need.

“Oh my God,” she said, pausing to stare in at a drugstore window that was full of hot-water bottles, “do not let them take this away from me. If the flesh must be blind, let the spirit see. Preserve me in disunity.
O di,
” she said aloud, “
reddite me hoc pro pietate mea.
”

It was certainly a very small favor she was asking, but, like Catullus, she could not be too demanding, for, unfortunately, she did not believe in God.

Acknowledgments are due
The Southern Review, Partisan Review,
and
Harper’s Bazaar,
in which certain of these episodes first appeared.

Mary McCarthy (1912–1989) was an American critic, public intellectual, and author of more than two dozen books, including the 1963
New York Times
bestseller
The Group
.

McCarthy was born on June 21, 1912, in Seattle, Washington, to Roy Winfield McCarthy and Therese (“Tess”) Preston McCarthy. McCarthy and her three younger brothers, Kevin, Preston, and Sheridan, were suddenly orphaned in 1918. While the family was en route from Seattle to a new home in Minneapolis, both parents died of influenza within a day of one another.

After being shuttled between relatives, the children were finally sent to live with a great-aunt, Margaret Sheridan McCarthy, and her husband, Myers Shriver. The Shrivers proved to be cruel and often sadistic adoptive parents. Six years later, Harold Preston, the children’s maternal grandfather and an attorney, intervened. The children were split up, and Mary went to live with her grandparents in their affluent Seattle home. McCarthy reflects on her turbulent youth, Catholic upbringing, and subsequent loss of faith in
Memories of a Catholic Girlhood
(1957) and
How I Grew
(1987).

A week after graduating from Vassar in 1933, McCarthy moved to New York City and married Harold Johnsrud, an aspiring playwright. They divorced three years later, but many aspects of their relationship would resurface in the unhappy marriage of Kay Strong and Harald Petersen in
The Group
. In the late 1930s, McCarthy became a member of the
Partisan Review
circle and worked actively as a theater and book critic, contributing to a wide range of publications, such as the
Nation
, the
New Republic
,
Harper’s Magazine
, and the
New York Review of Books
.

In 1938, McCarthy married Edmund Wilson, an established writer; together, they had a son named Reuel, born the same year. Wilson encouraged McCarthy to write fiction, and her first book, a novel entitled
The Company She Keeps
(1942), satirizes the mores of bohemian New York intellectuals from the point of view of an acerbic female protagonist. Her second book,
The Oasis
, a thinly disguised roman à clef about the
Partisan Review
intellectuals, won the English monthly magazine
Horizon
’s fiction contest in 1949.

Soon after her divorce from Wilson in 1945, McCarthy married Bowden Broadwater, a staff member of the
New Yorker
, and also taught literature at Bard College and Sarah Lawrence College.
A Charmed Life
(1955), a novel about the rollercoaster experience of a shaky marriage in a quirky artists’ community, is based on her life with Wilson in Wellfleet, Cape Cod.
The Groves of Academe
(1951), a campus satire informed by her teaching positions, casts an ironic gaze on the foibles of academics. Randall Jarrell’s novel
Pictures from an Institution
(1954) is said to be about McCarthy’s time at Sarah Lawrence, where he also taught.

In the 1950s, McCarthy took a strong interest in European history. Her two books about Italy,
Venice Observed
(1956) and
The Stones of Florence
(1959), combine art criticism, political theory, and reportage to bring the two cities’ histories to life. While on a lecture tour in Poland for the United States Information Agency in 1959 and 1960, McCarthy met the public affairs officer for the US Embassy in Warsaw, James West. McCarthy and West left their respective partners and were married in 1961.

McCarthy’s most popular literary success came in 1963 with the publication of her novel
The Group,
which remained on the
New York Times
bestseller list for almost two years, and was made into a movie by Sidney Lumet in 1966.

McCarthy remained an outspoken critic of politics in the decades that followed. Openly opposing the Vietnam War in the 1960s, she traveled to South Vietnam and wrote a series of articles for the
New York Review of Books
that were subsequently published as
Vietnam
(1967). Her coverage of the Watergate hearings in the 1970s is the basis for
The Mask of State
(1975). Her famous libel feud with writer Lillian Hellman, stemming from McCarthy’s appearance on the
Dick Cavett Show
in 1979
,
formed the basis for the play
Imaginary Friends
(2002) by Nora Ephron.