WHAT THE student, Sheila McKay, replied to his confidence was: how terrible, Dr. Mulcahy; how awful to have to break such a piece of news to your wife. Among the still-filial section of the student-body, the Mulcahys were acclaimed as a very devoted couple, an ideal couple, the girls said; so wrapped up in each other. They were popular, especially, as chaperons at the regular Saturday night dances, with the fat girls, pale girls, pimpled boys, chinless boys who stiffly paired off in the drafty gymnasium decorated with bows of crepe paper, while the rougher element, scornful of the old self-play phonograph or cheap three-piece band, of the basketball nets and the Indian clubs, drove off in its convertible to Gus’s roadhouse or put on its pork-pie hat and buttoned its windbreaker and hitchhiked down the state highway to York or Lancaster or up to Harrisburg or chipped in on a gallon of red wine and made love on the couches of the darkened social rooms. In the brightly lit gymnasium, however, Catherine Mulcahy, née Riordan, led off with a boy-student, her pale-rimmed spectacles folded in their case for the night, her long heavy straight brown hair wound up high with a Spanish comb from which a white-lace mantilla descended. She wore her wedding-dress, a white satin and net concoction with a short train; crystal drops sparkled at her ears; lipstick outlined her thin lips; and the pale, somewhat watery blue of her eyes, the sharp cut of her nose, which ordinarily had a secretarial quiver, were lustered and softened with excitement and a heightened sexual aplomb. “Doesn’t Mrs. Mulcahy look beautiful?” the girls cried to their escorts, identifying Catherine’s triumph over four children, housekeeping, and poverty with their own trepidant emergence from the chrysalis of slacks and blue jeans, with the innocent magic of parties, rouge, low dresses, music, with everything silky, shining, glossy, transfigured, and yet everyday and serviceable, like a spool of mercerized cotton or a pair of transparent nylons reinforced at heel and toe.
And Dr. Mulcahy, by the serving-table, quaffing fruit-juice punch and crunching cookies, waving jubilantly to his wife, arguing the quantum theory with a physics or a pre-med student, impressed for the boys and girls the die of authority on the gala, as a more personable teacher could not have done. This ugly, a-social man, at home and suddenly garrulous in their midst, shedding his terrors for them as his wife shed her spectacles, imparted to each and every dancer a sense of privileged participation, of having been chosen and honored, as though their act of choice in inviting him set them under a new dispensation, eventfully apart from the rest. These were not the remarkable students but the diffident, unoffending minority who, anywhere else but Jocelyn, would have been on top of the heap; and the knowledge that here the prerogative of extending the invitation weekly, of securing a sitter for the children, fell to them, of all people, rather than to their elders and betters, made them feel almost apologetic; their undeserved good fortune, surely, was a reflection on the Jocelyn system of values.
In the eyes of such mild maiden freshmen as Sheila McKay and her two roommates, the dances came slowly to be conceived as an object-lesson to the college; this, declared the minority, timidly presenting its bill of particulars, is what we would like Jocelyn to be. To have a good attendance became urgent and exemplary, as winter closed in and beer-cans piled up in the leaf-choked rain-pipes of the boys’ dormitories and the poker-playing crowd kept the girls in the neighboring building awake all night Saturdays and swaggered in, unshaven, to Sunday breakfast in commons, boasting of no-hours sleep. Proselytization for the dances went on, concomitantly, at an intensified pace in the girls’ rooms—“Don’t go to Philadelphia this weekend; stay and go to the dance!” Having been taught by their mothers that the girl was always at fault if the boy drank or took liberties, the missioners applied this principle to the social situation at Jocelyn, and, perched on the foots of beds, in pajamas, with cold cream on their faces, in the bathroom with soap-dish and towel, argued earnestly against weekend absenteeism, indifferentism, laisser aller, capitulation to the status quo.
They knew that at bottom the inert majority felt as they did: the girls’ rooms they visited were decorated with the same rag-dolls and teddy-bears, pink kewpies won at shooting-ranges, poufs and taffeta comforters, Mickey Mouse lamps, pictures of Mummy and Daddy in silver frames; the boys still had their lariats and bridles, souvenirs of the rodeo, autographed baseballs, bird-books—often, on the athletic field, on a clear fall afternoon, a boy would be seen flying a pale-blue kite into the blue sky. And yet agreement, they sorrowfully learned to recognize, was not tantamount to active adherence. In principle, most would admit that what Jocelyn needed in its social life was a certain modicum of formality and supervision. In practice, few, it seemed, were convinced by the assertion that Dr. and Mrs. Mulcahy had put new life into the dances by taking their chaperonage seriously. The majority would not consent to try out, even once, in action what it gladly conceded in talk, and, tendering promises of “another time,” “ask me later,” “give me a rain-check” (male), would follow the crowd as usual down to Gus’s roadhouse or off and away altogether. What disturbed the advocates of the dances most profoundly was the discovery of a fathomless paradox at the bottom of their friends’ thinking: in following the crowd, against their own will and judgment, they were following themselves, i.e., nobody.
Moreover, the claim that the Mulcahys took their chaperonage seriously, queer as this sounded as an inducement to youth in a progressive college, actually touched on a vital issue. The tolerance of other chaperons had been the subject of much student dispute. Certain younger teachers had been courting popularity by winking at gross infringements of the rules, allowing the punch to be spiked, hip-flasks to be produced on the dance-floor, necking to go on unchecked; on one occasion, even, marijuana had been smoked on the steps of the gymnasium during intermissions, with the tacit, shrugging knowledge of the faculty-member present. More responsible teachers, asked to serve as chaperons, irritably refused to give their time. Others treated the affair condescendingly, as a lark, coming in late, wearing ski-clothes or rough tweeds patched at the elbows, dancing close with their favorites or with members of their own party—moist-eyed strangers out of the night, wrapped in bright scarves and smelling of liquor. To such teachers, who appeared to live for the pleasure-principle, chaperonage, plainly, was a vast jest or a tiresome imposition; progressive education was a jest, which you winked at and made your living off; the students were comic archetypes, fantastic humors, butts of an educational ideology or else simply fair game, trophies of an impersonal venery—every year there were rumors of seduction, homosexuality, abortion, lesbian attachments, and what shocked the students about these stories, some of them very circumstantial, was the fact that they appeared to take place in a moral vacuum, to leave no trace the morning after; the teacher was at his desk, unchanged, smiling, impassive, and the student’s grade, a C usually in these cases, showed no improvement for the encounter.
Dr. Mulcahy, of course, was not the only instructor whose domestic life was regular, but he was the only one of the modernists who had a real sympathy for youth. He respected it in its integrity, its conservatism, its quest for forms, laws, definitions, ruling principles. Over his charges on the dance-floor, he exercised a jealous surveillance; woe to those intruders, Baal-worshipers, who tried to spike the punch when he was present. He did not dance, but his eye noted any disorder among the dancers; his plump finger signed; his head beckoned, vigorously nodded with approval when a jitterbugging pair desisted. Jingling a coin in his pocket against his wife’s compact and lipstick, he tested the beat of the music, relayed requests to the band or to the boy in charge of the records.
To his wife, Catherine, he frequently called out, in his soft, caressive voice, which always sounded coaxing as if it were calling a kitten, to ask whether she were tired, whether he could get her something, obviously for the purpose of receiving her radiant negative, the shake of the white mantilla proclaiming to all present her unquenchable, dauntless vitality. A certain element of tender prearrangement seemed to enter into their public relation, as though she were a film-star and he her discreet devoted manager. The girls loved this, as a sort of testimonial or advertisement of the permanence of romance in marriage. They clustered about the coatroom early to get a glimpse of him on his knees, fumbling with the clasps of her overshoes, while she waited, complacent, tapping her free foot, brightly waving and signaling, powdering her pointed nose. She would kick the overshoes off one by one, with a deft arch of her satined foot and then, with an imperious gesture, slip her old black daytime coat with its fox collar from her strong, full, lotioned shoulders and toss it to him at the coatroom window, with a cry, “Catch, Hen,” clear, bell-like, commanding, and a flash of the even teeth. The conspicuous whiteness and evenness of those teeth gave her beauty an incisory quality.
Dressed in their “date-dresses” or “semi-formals,” jeweled barrettes in their new-washed hair, the girls gazed at the pair with nudging, sympathetic smiles, like grandmothers watching babies in a play-pen, while the boys, garroted in neckties, their oiled hair striated with comb-marks, stood by with board-like faces, declining to see the meaning the girls squeezed out of this byplay; a few of the taller ones exchanged shrugs of irony that remarked on the married condition and on how the mighty had fallen.
And yet to the Jocelyn boy who suffered himself to attend these dances the Mulcahys were both “regular” guys. These youths, for the most part, were still squirming in the straitjacket of puberty; their hands trembled when they lit a cigarette; their wrists protruded from their coat-sleeves; they lived in an existential extremity; every instant of communication was anguish. Besides the beer-and-convertible crowd—the ex-bootleggers’ and racketeers’ sons, movie-agents’ sons, the heavy-walleted incorrigible sons of advertising geniuses who had been advised to try Jocelyn as a last resort—the male part of the college included an unusual number of child prodigies, mathematical wizards of fourteen, as well as some spastics and paraplegics, cripples of various sorts, boys with tics, polio victims. There were a deaf boy, a dumb boy, boys with several kinds of speech-defects; there were two boys who had fits, boys with unusual skin diseases, with ordinary acne, with glasses, with poor teeth, a boy with a religious complex, boys who had grown too fast, with long, chickeny necks and quivering Adam’s apples. The girls, by comparison, were blooming, healthy, often pretty specimens, with the usual desires and values, daughters of commercial artists, commercial writers, radio-singers, insurance-salesmen, dermatologists, girls who had failed to get into Smith or nearby Swarthmore, girls from the surrounding region, narcissistic, indolent girls wanting a good time and not choosey, girls who sculpted or did ceramics of animals or fashion-drawing, hard-driving, liverish girls, older than the rest, on scholarships.
This disparity between boys and girls created an awkwardness at the dances that made them seem like children’s parties, an enforced or legislated pleasure—the girls consciously exercised charity; the boys yielded to coercion. Under the Mulcahys’ auspices, however, all this took on a positive character. Those who were recruited came back again with a growing confidence that such wholesome pastimes were licit, superior, in fact, to the brute pastimes of the majority. The division of labor between husband and wife provided reassurance both to the boys who danced badly and the girls whose feet they stepped on; it gave an authoritative precedent for the differences between the sexes. With Dr. Mulcahy as a model, appearances lost their terrors. A stammer, a cast in the eye invested a cheese-faced boy with clerkly functions—he squinted on his partner from a knot-hole of male assurance.
Catherine Mulcahy, moreover, had a womanly, Irish way with her that put the boys at their ease. She was only thirty-one and light on her feet; she had a low, warm encouraging laugh; she remembered first names and nicknames, parents’ occupations, where one had gone to school, what one thought of it, where one went for the summer; she was the sort of person who was interested in your birthday, and who could tell you what sign you were born under, your birthstone, and the patron saint of the day. Like the hefty, bantering nurses who helped you undress in the family doctor’s office and knew your weight and how much you had grown in a year and your favorite movie-star, she had a sort of expertise in the gross data of your history that both made you uncomfortable and vaguely stimulated you, as though a cool hand, plumping your biography, patted the secret tissue of your being.
Henry Mulcahy, on the contrary, had no humor or small talk. He impressed the group of boys present with his indefatigable seriousness. Standing by the buffet, he allowed himself to be bombarded with questions, like a pitcher emerging from a ball-park or a great man arriving on the Queen Mary: “Dr. Mulcahy, what do you think of Whitehead? Do you accept Vico’s cyclical theory? Do you follow Freud or Jung? How do you stand on the veto?” He dispatched each query in turn, coolly, methodologically, meting out his thought in measured lengths, his reddish head bent attentively sideward to his questioner, as though to catch the precise phrasing of the order. Only the athletic coach, speaking of batting averages, winning infield combinations, end-runs, had an exactitude as tireless and considered as Dr. Mulcahy’s, a willingness to be tapped by all comers, as he sat crouched in the shed in his windbreaker. Like the coach, Dr. Mulcahy was sometimes tetchy, irritable with flim-flam and trifling; his mind was on twenty-four-hour patrol against incursions of the vague and the unformulated—women’s talk. In this touch of paranoia, the boys recognized themselves: the masculine principle. Here, while the music played, drifts of boys surrounded him; partners edged off the dance-floor—“Come on, I want to hear this”—listened, and danced again. A senior girl’s voice, plaintive, “Dr. Mulcahy, really, do we have to believe in orgones?” A racketeer’s son, guffawing, pulling his girl forward, “This, I gotta know.” But such questions and such auditors displeased him. He drew himself up; his fists clenched; his moon-pale face darkened; in or out of the classroom, he declined to discuss sex with adolescents. “Take your bull-session to the social room; I refuse to be baited and you know it.”
He made enemies thus and he welcomed it, welcomed it all the more because those who at one time or another he had to exclude from the dance-floor belonged almost always to the wealthier classes or to one of the powerful factions that ran the campus newspaper or the student-government association. Following such an outburst, the concise smile that hovered on his lips would grow more effulgent as his eye traced the offender out of the hall to the coatroom. His voice, resuming the conversation, was breathy with satisfaction, as though he had been running for a train and caught it. A messenger was sent to Catherine with a bulletin of reassurance: “Tell her, ‘don’t worry, Dr. Mulcahy says; everything has been taken care of.’ ” The boys left behind in the circle eyed each other embarrassed; they observed in the teacher a demand for congratulation that left them cold and stony—sufficiency was what they expected of adults. Yet in the long run the blame, they felt, lay more with those who provoked him than with Dr. Mulcahy himself. He was a good scout, they reasoned out later huskily among themselves, if you knew how to handle him, and, having pointed this out to each other, with recourse to many examples, they vaunted themselves on having found the knack.
Reports of such incidents naturally circulated. The younger group who attended the dances knew that it was said that Mulcahy wantonly tyrannized over them, that his caprices interfered with their normal pleasures and outlets. This flattered them, whenever they heard it, by making them feel “bigger” than the people who took their cause up, so that their denials had a certain unction: “Don’t worry about us, Mr. Fraenkel, Mr. Furness; we love it; really we do.” The effect was to draw together a little band of truth-seekers who met to tell each the latest, viz., the newest stupidity or distortion. Such slanders or crazy conjectures, the students noted, were especially rife in the Social Sciences Division. Mr. Fraenkel, for example, in Contemporary History, who tutored one of Sheila’s roommates, Lilia Jones, had gone so far as to wonder in conference whether Mulcahy might not have some sort of “hold” on the dance-committee—“a threat, conceivably, Lilia, to lower somebody’s grade?”
Pink Lilia recounting this interview to her fellow-committee-members spoke in a tense whisper; her fat ringed fingers gripped the conference table of the little room in Students’ basement. “I told him,” she protested, wailing, “that we wanted Dr. Mulcahy, that we loved Mrs. Mulcahy and liked to see her get away from the children. But he just wouldn’t believe me. ‘I can understand, Lilia, that you wouldn’t want to hurt their feelings.’ ” “Fraenkel’s got it in for Mulcahy,” hoarsely summed up a boy’s voice. But Lilia would not allow her tutor to be reduced to a motive; a staunch Social Science major, she saw both sides of every question. “No,” she said, thoughtfully, relinquishing her babyish manner. “I think you simplify. I believe he was trying to help us. He’s a younger man himself, a product of the Roosevelt years, and so he doesn’t understand, just because he’s so close to us, that our generation wants something different, more guidance, more control. Dr. Mulcahy,” she concluded, somewhat primly, “is far enough away from us to see us as we are.” “A-a-ah, what a raw deal, though!” cried another boy, wearily, making a face of disgust. “What’s the guy done that they’re always after him, hounding him, grilling you about him in conference? It stinks.” The committee looked at each other, feeling that something definite was called for. “Do you think we should tell him?” ventured a second girl. “No!” exploded the boy. “ ‘All so eager to make trouble,’ ” he mimicked them. “Leave him alone!”
Thus it happened that without his knowledge, a silent and even expectant cordon of sympathy had been drawn around Mulcahy and his family. The students had no way of guessing that he would or could be fired; they simply feared the worst, hopelessly, without denominating what it was. The sight of his old gray Plymouth sedan plying the icy back roads at all hours of the day and night, fetching groceries and drugs from the village, sitters from the college, laundry from a Mrs. Schmittlap in a farmhouse, affected his sympathizers with a sort of helpless consternation and humorous wry affection. The very weather, it seemed, was against him. Everything conspired. They heard rumors of unpaid bills, importunate tradesmen, radiators that had burst from the cold, sickness. The old car was a cartoon of man’s afflictions, out of Job by Laurel and Hardy. The roof leaked; the front window was missing; the windshield wiper was broken; the fuel-pump coughed; he was obliged to park on a hill to be sure of getting started. In town, coming out of the movies, four or five students would turn to and push him from the parking-lot where he was stalled. The tires were worn smooth, and the boys who sometimes accompanied him home to fix the furnace or shovel out the driveway could not teach him that the proper thing was to keep your foot off the brake and steer into the skid, so that in consequence he was dependent on the tow-truck and a surly garage-proprietor to whom he already owed money. Walking through the snow to telephone, he continually caught cold. His classes were accustomed to broken appointments, to the typed notice on the door, “Dr. Mulcahy will not be able to meet his students today. See assignment notice in the library.”
And yet in the darkening afternoons, when he chugged up to the Co-op with Mrs. Mulcahy and the children, leaving the motor running while he hurried them in to the counter for an after-school treat, ice-cream cones and Nabs all around, he and his wife, their noses white-tipped from the cold, were always brisk and merry. The Co-op’s prices, a current campus scandal, meant nothing to him at such moments; he paid festively, without demur, whispering in a child’s ear to offer the temptation of seconds, an Oreo, Necco wafers. In the smoky, crowded room his children whined a great deal, had the ball of ice-cream knocked from their cones, screamed, stamped their feet, clutched the crotch of their snowsuits and cried to go to the bathroom, but he, who flew off the handle so readily in his classes, was in this aspect unfailingly soothing and remedial. “Daddy will spank,” he chastised in his honeyed, wheedling voice, but he did not mean it; he would tap a sticky hand lightly with his fingers. The worn, scolding formulae of parenthood were frequently on his lips, but speciously, almost sycophantically, as an exudation of love: Nora was “naughty,” he coddled; Mary Margaret, “a bad girl,” and Daddy would “tell” Mummy on her, while his freckled hand strayed over the pigtails and his mouth puckered for a kiss. If a child cried, he “punished” whatever had offended it (“bad table,” “bad rough boy, did he jostle her?”) or else discovered “a sore place” and promised to have Mummy kiss it and “make it all well again.” The little girls thus formed the habit of striking him whenever they were angry with him, a thing that caused child-study majors and potential sitters to quirk their eyebrows telegraphically over their cokes or coffee, yet even they, watching him play hurt in turn (“acting out the inner tensions”) were moved to marvel aloud at his extraordinary patience and selflessness; not many fathers of this era would suffer children so cheerfully.
Mulcahy himself, just now, in speaking as he had to Sheila McKay, had slowly become aware of the sentimental appeal of his four children, four motherless children, he absently fancied them, so orphaned did he see them in her eyes. He had not fully appreciated, until he began to improvise, what a responsibility he had to his family. He had been speaking thoughtlessly, at random, out of the welter of gloomy associations induced by the President’s letter. The girl’s response brought him to his senses. He saw at once that to any normal onlooker the central point of interest in his dismissal would be the effect on Catherine and the children.
This obliged him to rearrange his emotions; he would not deny that, man-like, he had been laggard in marital feeling; an adolescent had set him to rights. Catherine’s health, always a matter of concern to him, now abruptly became paramount. He had no right, he remorsefully acknowledged, to inflict a new worry on her at a time when her strength was depleted. On no account must Catherine know; he rehearsed the prescription to himself, until he felt it inhere in him, like a natural, spontaneous anxiety. No worry, rest, light exercise—the warnings of doctors, reactivated, chorused sedulously in his ears. As if in deference to her condition, he lowered the pitch of his feeling; his thoughts went on tiptoe, gently, circling round her as he had seen her last that morning, milk-pale, dangling a toy over the sick child in its makeshift crib. The term, heart murmur, tumbled at him out of a disordered memory—was it herself or young Stephen she had been speaking of?
“I will not answer for the consequences”—his thought grimly fastened on this phrase which he had heard in so many movies that he could not recall whether it had actually been pronounced to him by one of the family’s many physicians or whether it was simply the gist, the hard core of what they had kept telling him. And to think, he said to himself, parenthetically, that he had once called this “meddling,” “interference between man and wife.” He brought his fist quietly down on the desk. He had known for the last five minutes, ever since the door had shut on Sheila, leaving, that he had Hoar on the griddle: he held him personally responsible for the life of his wife and/or child. He repeated the words with considered savagery, biting them off one by one, as though to say, Play that on your guitar.
He felt convinced, all at once, that Hoar had chosen, deliberately, to strike at him through Catherine. The letter was a mere move in a game designed to bring him to heel. Hoar knew very well what the shock might do to a woman with her kidney condition; to know such things, in fact, was his business as an administrator. Hoar had no real plan of firing him (that, actually, had been clear from the beginning); he wished simply to hear him plead, promise good behavior, learn his lesson. Mulcahy’s jaw set. Was he to come before this Pharisee as a petitioner, pleading for a woman’s life? For a moment his soul clearly countenanced the idea of killing wife and child, or, rather, of letting wife and child perish for the sake of an illimitable freedom. He knew himself capable of it and then gave way with a short laugh. “ ‘Springes to catch woodcocks,’ ” he remarked, lightly aspersing the old conflict between love and duty. The lethal decision, he perceived, was not his but the President’s, and Hoar was not equal to it. Smiling sharply, he locked his desk, opened the door into the corridor, found it empty, locked his door and, dropping the key into his pocket, hurried on tiptoe down to the little wing at the end, where his two friends and also Catherine’s friends, Mrs. Fortune and Miss Rejnev, had their offices.