The Company She Keeps (18 page)

On all of these subjects the old man held opinions that were in the eyes of most of his staff and many of his readers an indication of failing powers. Mr. Wendell was uncompromisingly against what he called, in a public-auditorium voice, this new spirit of bureaucracy, this specter that was haunting the world under the name of progressivism or communism. He believed in socialism, but he held out for an economy of abundance, for a free judiciary, and trial by jury. He stood for inviolable human rights rather than plans or programs; and no plan, he declared, was worth a nickel that would sacrifice these rights at the first hint of trouble. Years later, Jim decided that time had, in each of these instances, proved the old man right. At the moment, he was not so sure. He did not quite agree with his friends who considered Mr. Wendell a tiresome old fuddyduddy. Still, he thought that you could probably trust Mr. Roosevelt and Comrade Stalin to abrogate liberty only just so much as was absolutely necessary—and always in the right direction, that is, to abrogate your opponent’s liberty rather than your own. When he told the old man that he was making a fetish of civil liberties, that the liberties were for the people and not the people for the liberties, Mr. Wendell replied that Jim was making a fetish out of socialism. Jim had to smile a little ruefully, conceding the point.

One day a new argument occurred to him, one he had heard the Communists advance. After all, he said, there has to be a limit to everything. Nobody can be allowed to practice freedom at the expense of everybody else. The government, for instance, has to protect itself against sedition and against the betrayal of state secrets in wartime. He looked up at the old man expectantly, wondering what he could answer. “Doesn’t it?” he asked earnestly, when Mr. Wendell remained silent. “I don’t believe in war,” the old man answered calmly, and Jim blushed. He did not believe in war, either; at least he said he didn’t, not in imperialist war anyway; but the words he had just spoken seemed to show that he did, that he believed in it more than anything else, more than free speech, more than the right to agitate against the government. He was so deeply chagrined by this discovery that the thread of the debate slipped from his hands, and it did not occur to him until he lay in bed that night that the old man had not answered the question but only parried it, and in such a way as to assert his moral superiority, to remind Jim of his long and heroic career as a fighter for peace. Jim laughed to himself, and turned over, contentedly. Of course there had to be certain restrictions on liberty; anybody but an anarchist would admit that. Of course there would have to be policemen, even in a classless society. “I’m too much of a realist,” Jim said to himself proudly, “to imagine that anywhere, at any time, a state could be run on the honor system.” Yet there
was
a problem. People said that you must never forget that the Soviet Union was moving toward greater democracy all the time; you had to look at a thing like this Kirov business
historically:
if you remembered the Czarist repression and the hated Okhrana, you would see that the execution of a few White Guards was a step forward—there were merely a hundred or so of them after all. But that, Jim thought, was like patting a mass killer on the head because this time he had only committed one little murder. “No!” he heard himself say, loudly and defiantly into the darkness. It was wrong to condone an affair like these executions. So far the old man was right. But there must be some middle ground. You ought to hate the sin and love the sinner. That was very difficult in practice, but everything was difficult. At least, he congratulated himself, he had faced the problem, even if he had not solved it. He settled himself comfortably on the horns of the dilemma and fell asleep.

When he married Nancy Hodges, he invited everybody on the
Liberal
to the wedding. Some of the older women looked a little dowdy and were inclined to be skittish about the champagne, but Mr. Wendell made a distinguished appearance, and, in any case, Nancy’s parents, good, well-to-do Connecticut people, were not precisely streamlined themselves. The women, on their side, were faintly disappointed in Nancy. She was pretty, everyone conceded that; she had a straight, short nose and blond hair and sweet, direct, blue eyes. Yet somehow, they thought, she was not very
exciting.
She looked too much like her mother, which was a very bad thing in a girl. If Jim had to marry, they felt, it should have been somebody like an actress or a fast society girl or a painter or a burning-eyed revolutionary, somebody out of the ordinary. For Jim to have chosen such a humdrum little person as Nancy was, it seemed to them, a reflection on themselves. Around the office he had been so very careful: a cheerful word and a joke for everybody, but never a lunch or a dinner alone with a female member of the staff. They had not permitted themselves to feel resentment because they knew from the phone operator that there was a girl in the picture; and they had, one and all, persuaded themselves that she must be infinitely more beautiful and glamorous than they were. In this way, their own charms were not called into question. If a man prefers, say, Greta Garbo to you, it does not mean that you are not perfectly all right in your own style, not perfectly adequate to any of the usual requirements. The sight of Nancy in her wedding dress dispelled these comforting illusions. Every moderately young woman on the
Liberal
looked at Nancy and was affronted. “Why not me?” they all thought, as they clasped her small, plump hand, and murmured an appropriate formula.

“I’m afraid it’s going to be one of those Dos Passos situations,” the literary editor said to the managing editor on the way back on the train. “You know. She won’t let him see his friends or do or think anything that her father wouldn’t approve of. She’ll make him buy a house in the country, and they’ll live exactly like all the neighbors. She looks sweet, but like all those women she probably has a will of her own.”

Jim, however, had been alert enough to consider these possibilities for himself. Nancy was conventional in many ways, but she was not ambitious or priggish or socially insecure. Nancy believed that you ought to have children and that they ought to have good doctors and good schools and plenty of fresh air and wholesome food. She believed that it was nice to go dancing on Saturday nights, and that it was nice to take a vacation trip once a year. She wanted to have big comfortable chairs in their apartment, and a big comfortable colored maid who came in by the day, and the first thing she bought was the very best Beautyrest mattresses for them to sleep on, and the very best box springs for their twin beds. Later, they got a good radio and phonograph combination, and they collected the choicest classical records they could find. Nancy was, from the beginning, careful with Jim’s money and she put most of it into things that did not show, like the box springs, or a good plain rug, or life insurance. She subscribed to Consumer’s Union, and to the hospitalization plan. She bought her clothes at Best’s or Lord and Taylor’s, and if she had fifteen dollars to spare from her household budget, she would put it into a new electric mixer for her maid rather than into an after-dinner coffee service for herself.

On the other hand, Nancy gave money to beggars in the street. She was tender-hearted, and she had majored in sociology in college. She knew that conditions under capitalism were horrifying, and she would always sign a check for a worthy cause. Her father showed a tendency to snort over Jim’s activities; but Nancy handled this difficult situation perfectly: she took Jim’s side but she did not argue; she merely patted her father on the cheek and told him he was an old fogy. “Do you mean to tell me you believe in this communistic talk of his?” the old man would ask. “I don’t believe in
all
of it,” she would answer with dignity, “but I believe in Jim.” The phrasing was a little trite, but the sentiment was unimpeachable, for Nancy’s father, like everyone else, believed in Jim, too. He could not help it.

Nancy was limited, but she was good. And she expected things of Jim. This was what drew him. Unlike the people in the
Liberal
office, unlike the radicals of all groups that he had been hobnobbing with, Nancy did not want Jim on any old terms. Nancy was not exacting, and yet there was an unwritten, unspoken contract between them. If she, on her side, had renounced all dreams of fortune and large success, he, on his side, was renouncing the right to poverty, loneliness, and despair. She was not to goad him up the social ladder, but he must never, never let her down. It was understood that he should not be pressed to go against his convictions; it was also understood that she must not go hungry. When he thought about them in the abstract, it seemed to him, now and then, that these guarantees were mutually incompatible, that Clause B was in eternal obstinate contradiction to Clause A. In practice, however, you could, if you were sufficiently agile, manage to fulfill them both at once. The job on the
Liberal
kept his conscience clean and brought the bottle of Grade A to the door every morning. Many a discord, he thought, which cannot be resolved in theoretical terms, in real life can be turned into perfect harmony; and his own marriage demonstrated to him once again the superiority of pragmatism to all foreign brands of philosophy.

Still, he had misgivings. Sometimes it appeared as if his relation with Nancy were not testing his convictions so much as his powers of compromise. Their wedding had been a case in point. Nancy’s parents had wanted a church wedding, and Jim had wanted City Hall. What they had had was a summer wedding on the lawn with a radical clergyman from New York officiating. It was the same way with their choice of friends. Park Avenue and Fourteenth Street were both ruled out. The result was that the people who came to their cocktail parties, at which Nancy served good hors d’oeuvres and rather poor cocktails, were presentable radicals and unpresentable conservatives—men in radio, men in advertising, lawyers with liberal ideas, publishers, magazine editors, writers of a certain status who lived in the country. Every social assertion Nancy and Jim made carried its own negation with it, like the Hegelian thesis. Thus it was always being said by Nancy that someone was a Communist but a terribly nice man, while Jim was remarking that somebody else worked for Young and Rubicam but was astonishingly liberal. Every guest was a sort of qualified statement, and the Barnetts’ parties, in consequence, were a little dowdy, a little timid, in a queer way (for they were held in Greenwich Village) a little suburban. For some reason, nobody ever came to the Barnetts’ house without his wife, unless she were in the hospital having a baby. They came systematically in pairs, and, once in the apartment, they would separate, as though by decree, and the men would talk, standing up, against the mantelpiece, while the women chattered on the sofa. The same people behaved quite differently at other parties; but here it was as if they were under a compulsion to act out, in a kind of ritualistic dance, the dualism of the Barnetts’ household, the dualism of their own natures.

Jim recognized that his social life was dull, but he did not object to this. He worked hard during the day; he was alert and gregarious; he had a great many appointments and a great many duties. There were people who believed that he used Nancy as a sedative, to taper off his day, as some men take a boring book to bed with them, in order to put themselves to sleep. Yet this theory, which was popular in the
Liberal
office, was not at all true. Jim loved Nancy with an almost mystical devotion, for Nancy was the Average Intelligent Woman, the Mate. If there was narcissism in this love, there were gratitude and dependence, too, for Jim had a vague notion that Nancy had saved him from something, saved him from losing that precious gift of his, the common touch, kept him close to what he called the facts. Some businessmen say humorously of their wives, “She keeps my nose to the grindstone.” Of Nancy, Jim was fond of saying, “She keeps my feet on the ground.” The very fact that his domestic life was wholesome and characterless, like a child’s junket, was a source of satisfaction to him. He had a profound conviction that this was the way things ought to be, that this was life. In the socialist millennium, of course, everything would be different: love would be free and light as air. Actually, this aspect of the socialist millennium filled Jim with alarm; he hoped that in America they would not have to go so far as to break up the family; it would be enough if every man could have the rock-bottom, durable, practical things, the things Nancy cared about so very, very much.

Moreover, the insipidity of his domestic life was, in a sense, its moral justification. Jim could think of the poor and the homeless now, and conscience no longer stabbed him, for he had purchased his immunity in the true American Way. Unable to renounce money, he had renounced the enjoyment of it. He had sold his birthright to gaiety for the mess of pottage on the dinner table and the right to hold his head up when he walked through the poorer districts in his good brown suit. Christ could forgive himself for being God only by becoming Man, just as a millionaire can excuse his riches by saying, “I was a poor boy once myself.” Jim, in a dim, half-holy way, felt that with his marriage he had taken up the cross of Everyman. He, too, was undergoing an ordeal, and the worried look he had always worn deepened and left its mark around his eyes, as if anxiety, hovering over him like a bird, had at last found its natural perch, its time-ordained foothold in bills and babies and dietary disturbances.

Jim was quite sure that his marriage was “real.” It pinched him now and then, and that, to his mind, was the test. What disturbed him at times was the fact that it had been so extraordinarily easy to reconcile his political beliefs with his bread and butter. There ought to have been a great tug of war with Nancy at one end and Karl Marx at the other, but the job on the
Liberal
constituted a bridge between the opposing forces, a bridge which he strode across placidly every day, but which he nevertheless suspected of insubstantiality. There was something unnatural about a job that rewarded you quite handsomely for expressing your honest opinions; it was as if you were being paid to keep your virtue when you ought to be paid to lose it. More and more often it seemed to Jim that, if he was “facing facts” at home, in the office he was living in a queer fairy-tale country where everything was comfortable and nothing true. He might, however, have smothered this disquieting notion if he had not heard somebody else put it into words.