A Charmed Life (37 page)

He sat staring mechanically at the sheet of paper in the typewriter, on which he had written the date. All at once, everything was clear to him. He had the clue to Martha’s strange behavior. It was December, and she was thinking about Christmas. That was why she was going to Boston; that was why she had tried to borrow money from Dolly. She set foolish feminine store by anniversaries and holidays and loved to prepare surprises. She had been sad and abstracted lately because they were short of money and because she was determined, nevertheless, to buy him some extravagant, absurd Christmas present. Their first Christmas in their new house! That was precisely how Martha would think of it. She had made herself sick with worrying over her romantic contrivances; that was probably what had been wrong with her stomach. And now, undoubtedly, she had some scheme cooked up with the Coes, which was why she had been in such a hurry to answer the phone and to go off there, herself, without him.

He was torn between relief and exasperation. It lightened his spirits to realize that Christmas was the only thing that was the matter with Martha. At the same time, he could have screamed at how typical this was of her. She had always made a fuss over Christmas. In their little apartment in New York, they had always had a Scandinavian-style Christmas tree, with round Swedish cookies and colored candies and gingerbread men and walnuts gilded by Martha, and real candles, of course, burning in holders that had belonged to her grandmother and had been sent on, from Alaska, when her mother died. It had been extremely pretty, but dangerous; their apartment was a firetrap, and whenever the tree was lit he had had to stand by with a bucket of water and a fire-extinguisher, which Martha laughed at. And the candies and cookies on the tree invariably attracted mice; she insisted on keeping the tree up until Twelfth Night. There were always heaps of presents, expensive ones, from the very best shops. She rejoiced in having things specially made for him. And there was always a Christmas dinner party, with a goose and snappers for the guests. He could not deny that he liked this passionate festivity, but only because of her, because it transported him into the northern fairy world of her childhood, with real elk and reindeer and icicles. But he did not care at all about getting presents. This year, her play would be present enough, if she gave it to him in manuscript covers, with a dedication. He had told her this months ago, and she had agreed, but now she had gone back on her word, obviously, and was borrowing money they could not afford to give him something he did not want. He wondered, irritably, what it was she had in mind. An expensive phonograph, perhaps, like the one the Coes owned? Or some foreign books bound specially in violet bindings? Or could she be thinking (he shuddered) of giving him heat for Christmas, so that he would not have to fix the fires and the stoves? John shook his head; that was not quite right. Martha always preferred to give something solid, that could be opened under the tree.

And what was he to do? To stop this folly, peremptorily, or let her have her way and pretend not to notice what she was up to? She would grieve if he prevented her. For Martha, a bare Christmas would immediately become symbolic of the notion that their love had fled. He remembered, now, certain mournful, deep looks she had been casting at him, when she thought he was not observing her. These looks he could now decipher; they meant that she was being sorry for him because she had not yet thought up a way of getting money for his Christmas. Her obstinate, childish heart refused to learn that he was really indifferent to such things. It was only with her brain that she philosophized. A rueful tenderness plucked at his sleeve. Martha’s dreams and discontents, her plans and projects, were those of a young girl, whom he could still picture, on roller skates, with her book-strap. To her, reality still spoke a “little language,” like the language of the flowers, or of precious stones or apple seeds. Sooner or later, she would have to grow up, he reflected, but in a way he would be sorry to see it. The child in him, even in anticipation, fought against losing its playmate. Would he accept a “womanly woman,” calm as a Roman matron, in exchange for this precocious, learned, bold sister, who was always outshining the other pupils, thinking rings around them, as Dolly had once said, describing Martha in the classroom? For some reason, John suddenly felt melancholy grip him, like a pain in the heart. He saw them all as children, like babies pickled in bottles: Warren, a wizened boy, Jane a middle-aged schoolgirl in bloomers, Dolly, prim, in a hockey dress, himself on a rocking-horse charger, Martha. He put a fresh piece of paper in the typewriter and wrote: “Martha, I love you, but life is serious. You must not spend any money on Christmas.” He drew a heart and signed his name. She would find it in her typewriter in the morning.

Martha had the money in her pocketbook, and the name of a doctor in Boston, which Warren had written out for her. She was in an exalted mood. The night was bright and starry, though there was no moon. She was almost at the end of the ordeal, she said to herself calmly and joyfully as she backed out of the Coes’ driveway, with Warren’s flashlight beaming “Good luck” at her. They had urged her to stay and have cocktails with Eleanor Considine, the local poetess, who was coming to have dinner with them. But she wanted to get back to John. Eleanor Considine, a woman of fifty, with dyed red hair and a long amatory history, was a cautionary example of everything Martha was trying not to be. She had run away from a conventional husband, out west in Cincinnati, and married a young man, who had died of tetanus, all alone, in Mexico, from a cut she had neglected to have attended to. She had been married again several times, once to her original husband, who supported the several children she had picked up en route. She was now after the vicomte, who could give her a title, she said; she had set her cap for Miles and gone to him as a patient, after Martha had left him. Nothing fazed Eleanor, as her friends delightedly remarked. She had a rough, ringing laugh and an artless, witty candor; she confessed her misdemeanors to everyone, on first acquaintance; her truthfulness excused her, it was commonly felt. And she was always scribbling something, plays in verse, mock epics, love poems, elegiacs,
vers de société;
when she was on the wagon, she came to parties with a notebook in which she took down the conversation. Like Martha, she had a good ear, and many people still nervously agreed that she might do something eventually, even while they smiled at her pretensions to seriousness. But she insisted on regarding Martha as a rival, and Martha did not want to see her, even though, as the Coes said, she was getting old and deserved pity.

Tonight Martha could not tolerate the presence of anything petty. She was very much moved by what Warren had done for her. All she had heard from Warren, until today’s telephone call, was a hurried injunction to stand by: the money would be coming. Just now, while Jane was in the kitchen, he had related to her in an undertone the events of the past seventy-two hours. A gentle pride had emanated from Warren: he was proud of his aunt’s husband, proud of the vicomte, proud of his own subtlety in eliciting the name and address of the doctor, proud, even, in a curious way, of Miles, for behaving so terribly. Everybody, including Miles, had been prodigious.

This was what Martha felt herself, a sort of wondering gratitude, not only to Warren personally but to life itself, which suddenly revealed a new dimension, like Warren’s outer space, beyond the shining galaxies. She could not help thinking that she was in the presence of the sublime, which was of course the verge of the ridiculous. Happiness misted her eyes as she drove along the sand road; a hymn tune came to her lips. Despite the doctor’s caution, she was not in the least afraid. Abortionists, she had always heard, did their task much more proficiently than licensed doctors, and why shouldn’t they—they had more practice at it. In two days, it would be over. After it was over, she might possibly tell John. Perhaps she owed him the truth, so that he could hate her if he chose to. For a moment, back in her writing room, she had almost spoken. But now, with her mind very clear, she saw this impulse as sentimentality. Once it was all over, John would not hate her for what she had done; in fact, he would admire her resolution and fortitude. The only person he would hate would be Miles. Therefore, there was no reason to tell him unless she wanted praise at the price of peace in the community. Yet it would be good to have truth between them again.

In any case, she did not have to decide yet, and however she decided, it would be all right. She suddenly knew this, without knowing how she knew it. But it was an unmistakable certainty. In a matter like that, she could trust herself. For the first time in years, since the summer she had married Miles, she could say this aloud. She said it, and her wonder grew. She had changed; she was no longer afraid of herself. That was the reward of that fearsome decision, which no longer seemed fearsome, now that it was behind her. She laughed and stepped on the gas.
“Integer vitae, scelerisque purus,”
she sang, thinking of Warren. Around a blind curve ahead, she saw the faint reflection of the headlights of a car, coming rapidly toward her: Eleanor Considine, doubtless. Martha slowed down and hugged her own side of the road. As the car crashed into her and she heard a shower of glass, she knew, in a wild flash of humor, that she had made a fatal mistake: in New Leeds, after sundown, she would have been safer on the wrong side of the road. “Killed instantly,” she said to herself, regretfully, as she lost consciousness. This succinct appraisal, in the wavy blackness, became a point of light receding until she could find it no more.

A Biography of Mary McCarthy

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.