The Company She Keeps: A Novel

by Mary McCarthy

Ah God, it was too sad and awful, the endless hide-and-go-seek game one played with the middle class. If one could only be sure that one did not belong to it, that one was finer, nobler, more aristocratic. The truth was she hated it shakily from above, not solidly from

below, and her proletarian sympathies constituted a sort of snub that she administered to the middle class, just as a really smart woman will outdress her friends by relentlessly underdressing them. Scratch a socialist and you find a snob.

The subject frightened them both, for it suggested to them that the universe is mechanical, utterly predictable, frozen, and this in its own way is quite as terrible as the notion that the universe is chaotic. It is essential for our happiness, she thought, to have both the pattern and the loose ends, to roughen the glassy hexameter with the counter-rhythm of speech.)

Her peculiar tragedy (if she had one) was that her temperament was unable to assimilate her experience; the raw melodrama of those early years was a kind of daily affront to her skeptical, prosaic intelligence.

because the thing she really desired was to hear her father say, “Why are you suffering so? Is it so terrible for you here that you honestly cannot stand it?”

And she did not blame the policeman for thinking this. In fact, she expected him to think it. All the way home on the streetcar, seeing him begin to like her, seeing the sympathy spring up (her old man probably beats her), she had known that it was merely a question of time, that as soon as he met her father, a stupid, suspicious look would come over his cop’s face, and he would feel a little angry and ridiculous, hurt in his professional pride, as if somebody had picked his pocket. Nevertheless, when he had offered to buy her an ice-cream cone at the drugstore at the end

of the car line, she had accepted and gobbled it up quickly, just as later on, she would gobble up friendship, love, compliments, with the full prescience of what would come afterwards, the reproachful look, the averted head, the “You are not what you seemed.”

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.

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.

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.

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

Furthermore, the fact of her illness, a fact she could not talk away, since she went to the doctor daily, this fact was invaluable to him as a weapon in their disputes. He was always in a position to say

to her, “You are excited, you don’t know what you are saying,” “You are not a fit judge of this because you are neurotic,” “We won’t discuss this further, you are not sane on the subject,” and “I don’t want you to see your old friends because they play into your morbid tendencies.” And under the pressure of this, her own sense of truth was weakening. This and her wonderful scruples were all she had in the world, and both were slipping away from her. Overcome by the pathos of her situation, she began to cry.

In morals as in politics anarchy is not for the weak.

anything at all, is sweeter than responsibility.

The most curious thing about it was that their wounds, whose seriousness perhaps she had exaggerated, had been readily healed by time, while her own, being self-inflicted, continued to pain her. There are other girls in the world, but there is only the single self.

She had been married some time before she knew that she sounded exactly like Aunt Clara. Yet she could not stop, she was powerless to intervene when this alien personality would start on one of its tirades, or when it would weep or lie in bed in the morning, too wretched to get up. And when it began to have love affairs, to go up to strange hotel rooms, and try to avoid the floor clerk, she could only stand by, horrified, like a spectator at a play who, as the plot approaches its tragic crisis, longs to jump on the stage and clear up the misunderstanding, but who composes himself by saying that what is happening is not real, those people are only actors.

expressed itself in what you call emotional greediness, which has done you good as well as harm.

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.

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.