The Company She Keeps (27 page)

Her mother’s youth and beauty had tempered the amalgam. Nobody could have foreseen that she would die and bequeath her husband Aunt Clara, whose complaints, whose tears, whose blue-white mottled complexion, whose medals and dirty scapulars would put his egalitarian principles to the severest kind of test. Aunt Clara was, in truth, more than he had bargained for, and a more realistic man would have felt himself perfectly justified in calling the deal off, repossessing his daughter, bringing her up according to his own ideas, and letting the Pope go hang. Yet the very
injustice
of the legacy, its unwarranted, unforeseeable character, had moved her father to accept it. The fact that Aunt Clara was personally distasteful to him put her beyond the pale of his criticism, rendered her untouchable, sacred, just as the very real aversion he felt toward Catholic doctrine drove him to punish his daughter if her mark in Catechism was low. She understood this now very well, for she had inherited from him the twisted sense of honor that was always overpaying its debts, extorting from herself and from others the coin of unnecessary suffering to buy indulgences for a secret guilt, an unacknowledged shame.

Not until she was fifteen, however, did she guess the real nature of her father’s sin, and the bitterness of his protracted penance. She saw then that to have been locked in closets, beaten, forbidden to read, have a doll, go to the movies or the pantomime was as nothing compared to the agony of permitting these things to happen to your child in the interests of a religious tolerance that you did not really feel.

He had taken her to a dance at the house of one of her Catholic cousins. It was her first evening party. She wore a pink moiré dress with a big, dark-red velvet bow. She was new to the crowd of Irish boys home for Thanksgiving from a Catholic prep school and they kept cutting in and cutting in and bringing her glasses of weak punch from the buffet. Suddenly, her father had shoved his way past her admirers and snatched the glass from her hands. “Get your coat on,” he exclaimed in a strange voice, and began to push her toward the door. She was nearly crying when they reached the street, but he took her by the shoulders and shook her. “God damn it,” he said, “you ought to have more sense than to let those little micks get you drunk. Can’t you see they’re trying to make a fool of you?” “Why, father,” she said, “that’s not true. They liked me. They thought I was the prettiest girl …” “Stop your nonsense,” he shouted. “Don’t you know that they’re all laughing at you?” She had walked sullenly along beside him telling herself that it was hopeless, that she would never have a chance to get married if her father was going to act like this. At the same time, she had sensed that he was right; there
had
been something degrading about her success. The boys
were
awfully common, with their red faces and black hair; the whole party was common. Yet it was strange that her father should have noticed this, for he never made social distinctions. She pondered the word “micks,” which came so unexpectedly from him, who had taught her that you must never say nigger or sheeny or dago. All at once, she understood; it was as if he had told her the story of his life, and she was both sorry for him and frightened. In that terrible look on his face, in his hoarse voice, she read the living history of the Irish, the Jews, the Negroes. She felt closer to him than ever before; yet there was no doubt in her mind that her allegiance belonged elsewhere. Let her father vote for Hoover! She was for Al Smith, who used such bad grammar and was married to Mrs. Smith, who looked like all her own dreadful Irish relations rolled into one large woman and decorated with a string of beads. It would have been pleasanter, of course, if Al Smith had been a gentleman, if the Negroes were not colored, and the Jews were not Jewish. Nevertheless … Her heart quickened with romantic defiance. She shook off her father’s arm and stepped proudly into the car.

But by this time she was free. Aunt Clara had been turned into a housekeeper, to whom no one paid any attention, she herself was in her second year at a good boarding school, she had a clothes allowance and charge accounts, took her friends to lunch at the country club, went to the movies and the theater, and read whatever she pleased.
She had lost her faith.
That was what had done it. In her first year of high school, she came home from the convent one day and announced that she was an atheist. Her aunt had had a fit of hysterics and sent for the parish priest. Her father had said nothing, but when she refused to go to Mass the following Sunday, he picked her up and carried her out to the car, while she kicked at his legs and screamed. “You can send me there,” she kept repeating, “but you can’t make me go in.” At the Catholic church she declined to get out of the car. The chauffeur drove her around for an hour and then brought her home. “I didn’t go,” she said. That night her father called her into the library. “You’re old enough now,” he said, “to know what you want. I can’t make you go to church. I’ve tried to have you brought up a good Catholic because I thought your mother would want it so. I’ve let your aunt have her way, though I’ve told her she was being too strict with you, that there was bound to be an explosion. I can’t do any more.” He paused. “Are you willing to finish out the year at the convent?” She knew that she must take a strong line. “No,” she said firmly. “All right.” He smiled for the first time. “You’ll have to be tutored then till I can find a good school for you. I don’t want you to fall behind.” “I won’t,” she declared intensely, promising herself that she would repay his confidence in her by having a brilliant career. A great writer, an actress, an ambassador’s gifted wife. Perhaps he would like it best if she were to study for the bar. But no, that was out of the question; women lawyers wore flat-heeled shoes. A great lady of some sort who spoke six languages fluently, Diane de Poitiers, Ninon, or Margaret of Navarre.

With a conscious sense of drama, she walked over to the bookshelves and took down
The Queen’s Necklace.
Dumas had been forbidden her because he was on the Index. “Can I have this now?” she asked. Her father glanced up at the long line of novels in the worn, burgundy-colored bindings. “I ate those up when I was a boy.” She smiled and turned to go. “You can read it in here,” he said. “No need to rub it in. Your aunt is going to be pretty upset. You must go easy on her.” Her face fell. “You must learn to be a good sport, Meg,” he said gently. “It’s a poor winner that gloats.”

Would she have had the courage, she wondered, to have taken up that extreme position if she had not known, unconsciously, that deep down in his soul her father was cheering her on? She was not sure. “You must stop belittling yourself,” said Dr. James. “It doesn’t make any difference what you would have done under some different circumstances. The fact is that you did the best you could with the circumstances you had. Anybody on the outside would say you acted very bravely.” Ah yes, she thought, but again you miss the point. It had not been a real test. That was what she feared and desired, the real test, the ordeal, the burning tenement house with the baby asleep on the fifth floor (would you rush in and save it if there were absolutely no one looking, no God in heaven to welcome your charred but purified spirit, no newspaper account the next day, YOUNG WOMAN DIES SAVING SLUM CHILD; if there were nothing in the world but you and the baby and the fire, would you not say to yourself that it was undoubtedly too late, that the baby must already have suffocated, that the fire was not serious, that the baby was not there at all but in the house across the street?). And of course, as Dr. James said, life is not like that. In life there is always the mitigating circumstance: “Conditions were not right yesterday for the experiment that was to have been performed,” “Findings of observers are open to serious question because of the cloudiness of the atmosphere.” Yet actually all this is misleading; the details, the environmental factors, the conflicting accounts of witnesses serve merely to obscure the fact that the question has been put, is being put, will be put, but worded so ambiguously, tucked into such an innocent context, that the subject cannot learn whether or not he has taken the test, let alone what his mark is. It therefore becomes important—for the subject who is interested in his status (there are many who simply don’t care and doubtless they are the ones who graduate
summa cum laude
)—to examine the data of his life with the utmost severity and cunning, turning the facts every which way, sidewards, upside down, as one turned those old newspaper puzzles to find the face in the cloud.

In her own case, appearances were certainly against her. (Don’t look now but isn’t she the girl who stirred up all that trouble a few years ago? Treated her husband so badly he drove his car off that cliff. Of course, he was drunk and luckily he wasn’t hurt, but still … And then that other guy—what was his name—she worked on him till he left his wife and then wouldn’t have anything to do with him. And there was another story … he was sick and she didn’t go to see him … The time she made poor so-and-so quit his job on that foundation because it wasn’t radical enough to suit her … Got them to introduce her to some publishers and then dropped them like a hot-cake … Her best friend … Now she’s married to that architect, you know the one, that does those houses with ramps … I guess she’s got what she wants, but they fight like cats and dogs …) A shady case, unquestionably, a sordid history of betrayal. Yet, in some way, she was not like that. She would look at her face in the mirror and recognize in her features something direct, candid, sincere, some inward innocence engraved there that made strangers trust her on sight, tell her their troubles, ask her to watch their babies, help her carry her parcels. Policemen and taxi drivers smiled at her, truck drivers laughed at her hats. There it was, the unreasonable vote of confidence, which was not quite unearned. She would be, she felt, half entitled to it so long as she refused to become reconciled with herself, so long as the right hand remained on guard, the angry watchdog of the left. Yet in Dr. James’ eyes all this was sheer folly.

“Accept yourself as you are,” he said. “Stop trying to dig in to your motives. You have set yourself a moral standard that nobody could live up to. Your early religious training …” Ah dear, she thought, how they all deplore my early religious training. “For God’s sake,” her husband said, “give up worrying about your imaginary sins and try to behave decently. You use your wonderful scruples as an excuse for acting like a bitch. Instead of telling yourself that you oughtn’t to have married me, you might concentrate on being a good wife.” “But I do try,” she said sadly. “I really do.” “Oh, Jesus,” he said, “you overdo it or you underdo it. One day you’re a miracle of a woman and the next morning you’re a hell-cat. Why do we have to live like that? Why can’t you be like anybody else?”

That was what he had sent her to the doctor for—a perfectly simple little operation. First comes the anesthetic, the sweet, optimistic laughing-gas of science (you are not bad, you are merely unhappy, the bathtub murderer is “sick,” the Dead End Kid is a problem child, poor Hitler is a paranoiac, and that dirty fornication in a hotel room, why, that, dear Miss Sargent, is a “relationship”). After consciousness has been put to sleep, it is a very easy matter (just look the other way, please; it isn’t going to hurt, but the sight of the instruments seems to disturb excitable people like yourself), it is a very easy matter to cut out the festering conscience, which was of no use to you at all, and was only making you suffer. Then the patient takes a short rest and emerges as a cured neurotic; the personality has vanished, but otherwise he is perfectly normal; he never drinks too much or beats his wife or sleeps with the wrong person. He has returned to the Garden of Eden, the apple is back on the tree, the snake is a sportive phallus. If there is something a little bewildered, a little pathetic about this
revenant,
it is only that the ancestral paradise is, like all the homes of our childhood, smaller than he remembered.

Already, in her own case, the effects of treatment were noticeable. “You have lost those unnatural high spirits,” her friends told her. “You are not so tense as you used to be. You don’t get so excited about causes.” It was true, she was more subdued; she did not assert herself in company; she let her husband talk on his own subjects, in his own vein; she told white lies, where before she had only told black ones. She learned to suppress the unpleasant, unnecessary truths: why let an author know that you do not like his book, why spoil a party by getting into an argument, why not tell your friend that her ugly house is pretty? And why mention to your husband that you have spent too much money on an evening dress, gone to the races and lost, had too much to drink, let a man kiss you in the pantry? Pay your debt with the housekeeping money, take your mother’s bracelet to the pawnshop, stifle the hangover with benzedrine, say the ice tray stuck and you were a long time getting it out. Do, in other words, what every normal wife does, agree and go your own way (it would only upset him if he knew; it is not important anyway; he would think I was silly to mention it). And if you want the last chop on the plate, the last drink in the bottle, take it, do not force it on him merely because you want it so much—that would simply be making a nuisance of yourself. Stop trying to be fair; only a child insists that everything should be divided equally. Grab whatever you need; he will do the same to you.

What Frederick had not foreseen was that the good would vanish with the bad, that a man may easily overreach himself in making provisions for his comfort. His situation was like that of a woman who gets a hat altered to suit her features. It is only a small adjustment, the crown is lowered or heightened, the rakish feather is removed; there is no longer any fault to be found, but the customer looks in the mirror and weeps for her folly, because the hat is no longer stylish. Moreover, it is not returnable; it must lie in the closet for a certain number of seasons, till it is old enough to be given to a charity. And she herself was not returnable either. She could no longer go back into circulation, as she had done so often before. The little apartment in the Village, the cocktail parties, the search for a job, the loneliness, the harum-scarum, Bohemian habits, all this was now unthinkable for her. She had lost the life-giving illusion, the sense of the clean slate, the I-will-start-all-over-and-this-time-it-is-going-to-be-different. Up to the day that Frederick had sent her to the doctor, she had believed herself indestructible. Now she regarded herself as a brittle piece of porcelain. Between the two of them, they had taught her the fine art of self-pity. “Take it easy,” “Don’t try to do too much,” “You are only human, you know,” “Have a drink or an aspirin, lie down, you are overstrained.” In other words, you are a poor, unfortunate girl who was badly treated in her childhood, and the world owes you something. And there is the corollary: you must not venture outside this comfortable hospital room we have arranged for you, see how homey it is, the striped curtains, the gay bedspread, the easy chair with the reading lamp, why, you would hardly know it was a hospital—BUT (the threat lay in the conjunction), don’t try to get up, you are not strong enough; if you managed to evade the floor nurses, you would be sure to collapse in the street.