“MAY I SPEAK to you, Domna, for a moment?” Cautiously, like the emissary of his body, Henry Mulcahy’s head protruded into the Russian girl’s office, around the edge of the door, which had opened noiselessly to admit it, while Miss Rejnev and her boy-tutee, forewarned by a slight creaking in the hall a moment earlier, sat transfixed, as in a horror-film, watching the knob turn. Domna frowned and looked at her wrist-watch; she was new enough to teaching to have a puritan sense of duty to her students; she disapproved of interruptions during the tutorial hour; yet Henry Mulcahy for her was invariably a special case, precisely because he was contemned, despised, importunate, and a clever man withal. She hesitated. “I can come back a little later,” he vouchsafed, twirling the doorknob and swinging the door on its hinges. “I can come back, Miss Rejnev,” put in the boy-student, eagerly resolving the difficulty. But this munificence, in its turn, annoyed her; the better Jocelyn student, like this one, was all too accommodating, ready to be put off, to anticipate faculty weakness and serve it sedulously, like a cause. “Could you wait five minutes, please, in the corridor?” she said to Henry abruptly, in a voice that mixed apology with severity. In exactly six minutes, she reopened the door, and the tall student passed through it, smiling. “Next!” he said to Mulcahy, with a wink.
Domna Rejnev was the youngest member of the Literature department, a Radcliffe B.A., twenty-three years old, teaching Russian literature and French. To deter familiarities, she wore a plain smock in her office that gave her something of the look of a young woman scientist or interne. Her grandfather had been a famous Liberal, one of the leaders of the Cadet party in the Duma; her father, a well-educated man, a friend of Cocteau and Diaghileff, sold jewelry for a firm in Paris. She herself was a smoldering anachronism, a throwback to one of those ardent young women of the Sixties, Turgenev’s heroines, who cut their curls short, studied Hegel, crossed their mammas and papas, reproved their suitors, and dreamed resolutely of “a new day” for peasants, workers, and technicians. Like her prototypes, she gave the appearance of stifling in conventional surroundings; her finely cut, mobile nostrils quivered during a banal conversation as though, literally, seeking air. Her dark, straight, glossy hair was worn short and loose, without so much as a bobby-pin; she kept ruffling an impatient hand through it to brush it back from her eyes. She had a severe, beautiful, clear-cut profile, very pure ivory skin, the color of old piano-keys; her lips, also, were finely drawn and a true natural pink or rose. Her very beauty had the quality, not of radiance or softness, but of incorruptibility; it was the beauty of an absolute or a political theorem. Unlike most advanced young women, she dressed quietly, without tendentiousness—no ballet-slippers, bangles, dirndls, flowers in the hair. She wore dark suits of rather heavy, good material, cut somewhat full in the coat-skirts: the European tailor-made. Only her eyes were an exception to this restraint and muted gravity of person; they were grey and queerly lit from within, as by some dangerous electricity; she had a startling intensity of gaze that never wavered from its object, like that of a palmist or a seer. Her voice, on the contrary, was low, concise, and even; a slight English boarding-school accent overlaid a Russian harshness.
As Mulcahy had more than once said of her, she had the temperament and vocation of a narodnika. This was a girl, he estimated, who could very easily throw herself away. He had marked her out for his friendship at the beginning of the term, having watched her go through her paces at a departmental meeting, and sped straight home to describe her, like a man who knows horseflesh who has just clocked a maiden filly at a morning run on the track. His wife concurred in his judgment when he brought her back to supper, approved the girl’s bright eyes, willingness to help with the dishes, aptitude for mimicry of stuffy colleagues in the department, gratitude for being initiated into the inside workings of faculty politics, corroboration of Henry’s assessments of various key individuals, the librarian, the Gestalt psychologist, the secretary of the faculty, the little Four Quartets boy who squeaked “tradition” when you pressed him and would cut your throat in an instant for the advancement of Number One. It was not only the incisiveness of the girl’s mind that impressed both Mulcahys so forcibly but the directness of her heart and the current of vitality that ran through her, rare enough in anybody, but perfectly unbelievable at Jocelyn in one of “our” persuasion. Sound her as they would, they had, up to this morning, found nothing false or hollow in Domna; in politics, perhaps, she tended to use somewhat too simplistic an approach, following her compatriots, Tolstoy and Kropotkin; yet she rang true as steel on every immediate issue. The fact that the usual time-servers and trimmers on the campus, including even the wondrous Hoar, appeared to share their admiration put them a little on their guard, but so far they had seen nothing to indicate that these others knew the real Domna; and they laughed to think of what Maynard would think if he could guess what the real Domna thought of him.
Henry, as he hurriedly closed the transom and bolted the door behind him, while the girl’s eyes slowly dilated in wonder and misgiving, had no doubt, he told himself, of Domna’s immediate partisanship. The meals she had eaten in his house, the Canadian Club whiskey he had poured for her, in violation of his custom and budget (for Domna, as he and Catherine had quickly observed, liked to drink three little jiggers of neat whiskey before she ate her dinner), the small presents she was in the habit of bringing them—a dish of Russian kïssel with a white napkin over it, french chansons with pictures for the children, a small volume of Heine—the silver lent by Cathy for a party, the Christmas tree with real candles ordered by Domna from abroad, the movies seen, car borrowed, opinions matched, jokes shared, all reassured him of her fealty; she could not go back on this. Still, he felt a certain constraint and uneasiness as to where to begin, whether to tackle her first on the academic freedom issue, or to convince her at once of the imminent danger to Cathy, a danger which, only a few moments before, he had been so fuzzy-minded as to regard as merely hypothetical but which, now that he had faced up to it, should make everything else secondary.
And yet there were many, he thought vindictively, on this “liberal” campus who would suppose that Cathy’s condition was something cooked up by himself to ward off being dismissed without so much as a thank-you, many, indeed, not so far off at this moment—he shot a quick barb down the corridor in the direction of Howard Furness’ office—who would want a thorough medical report signed by an “impartial” physician, in fact a coroner’s inquest certifying the cause of death, before they would believe the simple clinical truth, just as, he presumed, they would have to see a Communist Party membership-card (produced by an F.B.I. agent) made out to Henry Mulcahy, before they would be willing to admit that his dismissal was a part of a campaign of organized terror in the universities against men of independent mind. But Domna, he reflected thankfully, was not one of these; she did not require a statistical analysis to see what was under her nose; moreover, as he happened to know, she had lost her mother under circumstances horribly similar to those in which Cathy now stood. That good lady, stigmatized by her family as a malade imaginaire, had died of typhoid on a freighter en route from Lisbon to Buenos Aires, so Domna’s aunt, her sister, had informed him, while he drove her around the campus to spell Domna, who was teaching a class; and the family, for a long time, she assured him, held Domna very much responsible, both for instigating the trip (“Why not put up with the Germans, I ask you, Mr. Mulhall?”) and for not calling the ship’s doctor sooner (“A girl of fifteen is for us already a woman, Mr. Mullaly, especially when she mixes in politics”). It did not need Freud’s insights or Madame Repina’s intimation (“A little nervous breakdown, you understand what I mean, eh?”) to sympathize with the youngster who carried such a memory about with her, a veritable nightmare of fantasied aggression and punishment, and to calculate that of all things in the world that Domna would not risk again, the death of an older woman would surely figure first.
Indeed, had there been anybody else to turn to whom he could count on as he could count on Domna, he would gladly have spared her these next moments, which might very well reactivate the traumatic experience; for, desperate and harried as he was, he did not deceive himself as to what Catherine meant to her, what their long morning talks and endless cups of black coffee had done to make Jocelyn habitable for this lonely, affection-starved child. (And the fact that Cathy had given herself always without stint, not ever letting Domna guess that her health was not up to such demands on it, would no doubt add a belated remorse to the poor girl’s other feelings.)
Silently, he took the letter from his breast pocket and handed it across the desk. While she unfolded it, he dropped into the side-chair still warm from the student’s bottom and affected to study his fingernails while watching her beneath his granulated lashes. Truth to tell, he was quite curious to trap her first reaction, not because he doubted her at all, but merely from professional interest: would Hoar’s move come as a surprise to a fellow-member of the teaching caste or had they all been quietly anticipating it while only he had been gulled? But the girl’s eyes, moving across the typescript, betrayed nothing, really. She turned white, he thought, for an instant, and then a light flush that might have been anger reddened her pointed cheekbones. “No!” she finally whispered in a shocked and scarified voice, as she passed the letter back to him—from which he was able to glean that rumors of his debts and generally poor prospects had reached her; she knew, then, that this was the end for Henry Mulcahy and Co. They sat and stared at each other without a word. Mechanically, she took a package of cigarettes from her smock pocket and offered it to him, as a warden offers a smoke to a condemned prisoner, and he silently waved it aside.
They heard the bell ring for the next class before she roused herself to speak and then she only said, absently, “When did you get it? This morning?” That she made no other inquiry struck him at once as peculiar. Was her mind already busy with the next step, with remedies and recourses, or had she somehow known all along? Had the department been consulted? Was it a departmental decision, taken without his knowledge? Could she, even, have concurred in it? “But appointments are not made until spring,” she suddenly objected, just as he was giving up hope of any spontaneous response from her. He drew a quick breath of satisfaction; she too, then, like himself, was simply stunned by the irregularity of these proceedings. Relieved, he decided to take the bull by the horns. “Domna,” he said, hurriedly, “I have something to tell you, in confidence. But first I must be able to trust you. Answer me honestly, is this the first word you have heard of this dismissal?” She nodded swiftly twice. “On my word of honor.” “There’s been no criticism of me in the department?” “Absolutely not. I swear it.” Her tone had grown very positive, yet he thought he had heard, deep down, a little wavering in it, as of some qualification quickly overridden. . . . He waited. A faint, lurking smile appeared at the corners of her lips. “Some think you go too far,” she murmured, “on the Buildings and Grounds question. Your scrambled eggs. . . .” A crinkle of laughter was in her voice, half-apologetic, as if inviting him to join in this belittling view of his activities. He stiffened. “Who thinks this?” he demanded, eyes narrowing. Domna flushed. “All of us. No one in particular. I, if you want, for one.” Having made this confession, Domna obviously grew confused and began to let out more than she had intended. “But nobody,” she explained, “takes a strict view of it, not even Maynard.” Henry raised his eyebrows. “You’ve discussed it with him?” he cried. “Of course,” she answered, self-justificatory, and would plainly have said more but he raised his hand to forestall it—it was evident that the girl had betrayed him, but the point was academic now. He got up, thoughtfully, from his chair and strolled over to the window, his hands plunged into his pockets, and stared out over the snow.
“Domna,” he said, turning suddenly, “there’s something I have to tell you. Cathy is ill, dangerously ill. She doesn’t know it herself; nobody knows it but the doctor and myself and two other persons—Esther and Maynard Hoar.” The girl gave a frightened gasp and her hand flew out in sympathy; she half rose from her seat, as though to comfort him. But he held her off and commenced to pace rapidly up and down. “It’s a heart and kidney condition brought about by Stephen’s birth. Nothing that she won’t recover from, given freedom from worry. There’s low blood pressure too and a secondary anemia, a syndrome, as they call it, embracing the whole system.” Her lips moved tensely, following him; plainly, she was trying to relate the fearsome clinical terminology to the handsome, flesh-and-blood woman who was her friend, always eager to lay down mop or carpet-sweeper for a cosy cigarette or a final mid-morning cup of coffee. “The doctors agree,” he consoled her, “that a normal life, in the circumstances, is the very best thing for her. Recreation, fresh air, light housework, even driving the car—the point is to spare her knowledge of her condition, which might affect her like any other sudden shock, that is, induce a coma or syncope that might or might not prove fatal.” The effort of pronouncing the last words in a tone of detached objectivity brought tears unexpectedly to his eyes; with a strangled sound and wry gesture, he sank into the chair, removed his bifocals, and sobbed into his handkerchief, while Domna stroked his frayed sleeve and uttered words of comfort and hope. “What am I to do, Domna?” he suddenly cried, from the depths of his extremity, pulling himself bolt upright in his chair and transfixing her with his eyes, half blind and crazily staring. “You tell me,” he demanded. “What am I to do?”
Truly, he realized with astonishment, he had lost all control of himself. To cry brokenly before a girl nearly twenty years his junior had been no part of his intention; the utter misery of his situation had sprung on him, as he was speaking, from cover, like an animal at the throat. He wept hopelessly from sheer hatred of the universe, including the girl who was watching him and who could do nothing, of course, to help him, as he now for the first time clearly saw and admitted to himself. To his surprise, in the midst of his tears, Domna got up and left the room, locking the door behind her, coming back in a few minutes with an aspirin, a benzedrine tablet, a glass of water, and a clean handkerchief wrung out in cold water. “I’ve phoned Cathy,” she said, “to tell her you’re staying to lunch at the college. If you’d like a drink of whiskey, I’ll take you home to my house in my car.” Henry shook his head. He accepted the pills and put on his glasses, carefully, adjusting the wires over his ears. “Now,” she said, “what did you mean when you said that Esther and Maynard knew that Cathy was dangerously ill?”
Henry bit his lips. He had added this detail on impulse and now he must make up his mind to tell her the whole squalid story, sparing neither the Hoars or himself, or forfeit the support she could give him; no half-measures would do. If Domna were satisfied that Maynard, knowing of Cathy’s condition, had determined in cold blood to fire him for shabby political motives, she would fight for his reinstatement straight up to the board of trustees; even so, he frankly hesitated, being sharp enough to see that the knife cut two ways. If Cathy’s condition or the knowledge of it imposed on Maynard Hoar the moral obligation not to fire him, should it not have imposed on her husband an even stronger obligation not to behave in such a way as to get himself fired? A man with a sick wife did not receive carte blanche to abuse the responsibilities of his position, but if a man with a sick wife was unreasonably discharged from his position, then the wife’s health could become a significant factor in arguing for his retention. In short, the more he pondered on it, leaving his own feelings aside, the more clearly he saw that the case was and must be one of academic freedom. In which event, it behooved him to tread warily with Domna, who was capable of subordinating all other issues, dramatically, to the single life-or-death issue, in the manner of Dostoievsky and other Russian sentimentalists who opposed capital punishment and were fond of asserting categorically the absolute sacredness of the individual life. There was no question but that this would alienate from him certain older men on the faculty who, disliking Hoar, would probably be open to conviction on a purely professional argument. On the other hand, there was no doubt that Domna, pleading for another woman’s life, would have behind her many of the women of the faculty who would not dream of enlisting their sympathies in an academic freedom case.
And the more he envisioned this prospect, the more he was of two minds about it: could Domna be trusted to keep this side of the affair in perspective? “I told Esther,” he answered wearily, “a long time ago, under circumstances I don’t like to remember.” He rested his cheek in his palm. “Before your day, little Domna.” Memories of that epoch disturbed him; he had almost forgotten the time when he and the Hoars had been like a single family, before Maynard unaccountably—yes, even now unaccountably, for all that he now knew of Maynard—showed him the cold shoulder. “Yes?” Domna urged with a little whet of curiosity. Henry suddenly laughed. “Very funny, Domna. Last spring, less than a year ago, when I brought Cathy and the children here, I had Maynard’s word that the appointment was to run for two years, at the minimum. Nothing on paper, of course. A gentlemen’s agreement. ‘Jocelyn doesn’t part with good men, Hen; frankly, between ourselves, she can’t afford to.’ ” He laughed again, more harshly. Domna frowned. “A pity you didn’t get it on paper,” she murmured.
This remark moved him to merriment. He laughed once again, but now genuinely, intellectually, till the tears rolled from his eyes. “Precisely,” he cried. “You have it. Proceed to the head of the class. A pity it is, indeed.” But as she commenced to laugh also, his mien immediately sobered. “Domna,” he confessed, “you won’t believe it, but I did try to get it on paper and at that moment my friendship with the Hoars evaporated. Overnight. From that moment, Maynard has hated me without respite.” He spoke with force and impressiveness, bringing his hand down on the chair-arm; yet he thought he saw an inner doubt or reservation shadow the girl’s brow. “Listen, Domna,” he said earnestly. “Forget whatever you may have picked up or whatever Maynard has told you and hear my version first. It does me no credit, I promise you, and you can judge for yourself how it leaves our friend, Maynard.” He began to pace the room. “Last spring, as the campus gossip may have told you, my status here was rather irregular. After the ruckus out West had made all the papers and figured in the Nation and the Witch Hunt book, as well as in a report of the A.A.U.P., several anonymous friends of the college got up a little purse and turned it over to Maynard, to use as he saw fit for victims of the purge in the universities. At that time, there was no vacancy in Literature and he used this grant to appoint me visiting lecturer in humanities—a special creation—with the understanding that I would be fitted into the Literature department at the first opportunity. However, as it happened, no vacancy did occur and I was unwilling to bring Cathy and the children on from her mother’s without some assurance of tenure; Stephen had just been born. Maynard was very good about this; I was allowed certain traveling expenses to commute back and forth every month and free quarters in Barracks C, since it would be an obvious hardship for me to keep up two establishments on my salary. Once or twice I used this expense account to bring Cathy on to Jocelyn for a week or so; another time, say two times at most, I met her in Pittsburgh for a long weekend. I had my schedule arranged, so as to be free Mondays and Fridays. Well, as could have been predicted, someone—they say a student—carried the tale to Hoar: I alone on the faculty was teaching a three-day week! Maynard had me on the carpet, very firm, and, to do him justice, sympathetic. He foresaw an opening in Literature, but if my appointment were to be put on a regular, permanent basis, a new living arrangement would have to be stipulated. As an official member of the department, I would be expected to conform to the Jocelyn principle of communitas!”
Domna nodded, warmly. “I too!” she exclaimed. “ ‘The fully resident faculty. . . . we don’t punch a time-clock here, Miss Rejnev, but we must ask you, in all conscience, not to emulate Bard and Sarah Lawrence and treat us as though you were a commuter.’ ” The vagaries of the President’s diction seemed to evoke nostalgia from both of them, for a time when they had merely laughed over Maynard. Henry swiftly cut into this mood.
“Naturally, I insisted on a two-year contract to compensate me for the expenses of moving. Maynard perfectly saw my position, agreed with it, but unfortunately the policy of the trustees gave him no leeway. Contracts at the instructor level ran for the single year only. No exception to be made without establishing a precedent, and tradition only permitted three professorial salaries in the Division, one full professor in Languages, two associates in Literature. He could give me his word, of course, that the appointment would be continued, if I, on my side, would give evidence of my own commitment by bringing on Cathy and the children and taking a house in the neighborhood.” He came to an abrupt stop in his pacing, folded his arms, and stood looking down at her, measuringly, while he tilted the tip of his tongue against the sharp edges of his teeth. “At that point,” he said, “I did a very foolish thing.”
“You told Esther,” she suggested, in her low, consolatory voice. This divination of his conduct rather startled him; he had intended to take her by surprise. “About Cathy’s condition? Yes,” he acknowledged. “It was a question of paying the movers to get the furniture out of storage. My mother-in-law, who could pay, was understandably against the move. I didn’t know where else to turn. It appeared to me that Esther, if she knew how serious things were with Cathy, how necessary security was for her, might stir Maynard up to give me a letter, something on paper, you know, to show the old lady. In fact,” he admitted apologetically, “I’d already wired Cathy that such a letter was in existence.”
Domna turned white. “Oh, no, Henry!” she protested, as if to deter him from continuing with a tale that harrowed him too much. “Wait!” He raised a finger and moved a little nearer to her. He experienced a strange, confident exhilaration in forcing her to know him at his worst. “Exactly fourteen hours after I spoke to Esther, Maynard called me to his office.” He paused. Domna caught her breath. “To assure me that the ultimate decision rested with my own conscience. The college would exercise no pressure.” He spread his freckled hands expressively. “By that time, the van was crossing the Alleghenies.”
Domna’s whole body stiffened, while Henry watched her curiously. This, he was aware, was the real crisis in her loyalty; yet he felt no impulse to press her, but rather a pleasure in waiting while she worked out her own course. She was too intelligent not to see that Hoar had put himself in the clear, that there was not the shadow of a claim on him, technically speaking: his hands were as clean as Pilate’s, ceremonially laved on his balcony; his wife doubtless had had a dream and sent to him, saying, “Have nothing to do, Maynard, with this just man.” Yet did not this precisely make the point? Would Domna be wise enough to know that this very avoidance of a claim on him was in Maynard the measure of an atrocious guilt, a refusal of responsibility, of jointness in the Mystic Body (“We are members, one of another”)?
Domna’s rose-colored lips curled. “Monster,” she spat out calmly. “Monsters, both of them. Do they think then that that absolves them?” She made a rather theatrical gesture of drawing her skirt aside. Henry was filled with amazement. He felt himself catching fire, quite impersonally, from her, as if his own paler responses blushed beside this defiance. What marvelous contempt, he inwardly exclaimed, and puckered his own lip sourly in imitation of this sublime disdain. “Still, Domna,” he expostulated, in an aggrieved and somewhat whining tone. “Maynard can plausibly contend that he has no responsibility for Cathy, in fact that he tried to deter me from making an imprudent commitment. We mustn’t commit the error of putting Cathy’s health too much in the foreground of the case.” Domna, as he had feared, seemed to be genuinely astonished. “Why not?” she cried. “What else could be in the foreground?” Her dark brows arched in vivid semicircles as she swung around to face him. As always in moments of excitement, her accent became more marked. “What is complicated here?” she protested. “It is all very simple. One does not undertake actions that will lead to the death of other people, short of war at any rate. Does Maynard Hoar accept himself as a murderer? Will you accept him so?” Her strange, intent eyes were shining; she tossed her head angrily and the dark, clean hair bobbed; she clicked her pocket-lighter and drew in on a cigarette. “This cannot be permitted to happen,” she declared quickly, amid puffs of smoke. “One simply refuses it and tells Maynard Hoar so.” She jumped up, knocking a book off the desk, and seized her polo coat from the coatrack. “I shall do it myself at once to set an example.”
Henry moistened his lips, half tempted by this rashness. “You forget that it must be kept from Cathy,” he said peevishly. “If you go to Maynard in this mood, the whole campus will hear of it.” Domna stood holding her coat. “Come,” he said, “sit down. Do you think that you will convince Maynard by moral arguments when he has already come to this decision fully knowing of Cathy’s condition? Let me tell you something more. In the desk at home, there is a forged letter purporting to be from Maynard, promising me a permanent appointment. Cathy believes in that letter. Do you see now that we must be quiet?” Domna slowly put her coat back and leaned against the desk, lacing and unlacing her fingers. “What’s to be done then?” she asked in a toneless voice. “What’s to become of you, Henry?” Her eyes, wide and frightened, ransacked him as though seeking his destiny. He shrugged. This new admission, he saw with relief and a certain misanthropy, had put her altogether in his hands; his malfeasance would make her submit to his better judgment as to ways and means, as she would submit to the superior knowledge of a criminal whom she was concealing in her house. At bottom, he reminded himself, she was conventional, believing in a conventional moral order and shocked by deviations from it into a sense of helpless guilt toward the deviator. In other words, she was a true liberal, as he had always suspected, who could not tolerate in her well-modulated heart that others should be wickeder than she, any more than she could bear that she should be richer, better born, better looking than some statistical median.
And now, lo and behold, she was proceeding to give him a perfect example of these mental processes, even when one would have thought that her eyes would have been opened to a darker truth about human nature than her philosophy admitted. “Henry,” she began, frowning, “is it possible, do you suppose that Cathy, unknown to you, has talked about this contract among the faculty wives?” “Cathy doesn’t see the faculty wives,” he answered with impatience. “In the nursery school? In the grocery store?” She pushed her feminine point home with typically feminine insistence. “Supposing she did mention it?” she persisted. “It would be a perfectly natural and harmless thing to do, if one were talking about next year or plans for the children. Yet mention of a two-year contract could give rise to all sorts of jealousies and resentments, even on the upper levels. Suppose then some husband carried the story to Maynard and demanded to know whether it was true or not? Can’t you then imagine Maynard’s getting very angry and giving you notice straight off, simply to show you who was master, who wrote the contracts at Jocelyn?” She had moved along the desk till she was close to him and could look up softly into his face, like a pleading sweetheart urging her boy to reform—with no idea that she had offended him and was offending him more with every irrelevant word she uttered. “I don’t mean to exculpate Maynard, but if this should be so, it at least makes him understandable. Perhaps, if I were to talk to him, he would tell me and I could explain it to him . . . ?” She stole another glance into his face and broke off, suddenly irresolute.
Without answering, he strode over to the window and looked out at a truck which was unloading some crates onto the platform of the maintenance building on which Domna’s office faced. The blank brick walls of the maintenance building, the smoking chimneys of the incinerator, the heavy truck with its indubitably dubious cargo—how many crates short was this order, what was the kickback today?—all perfectly suited his humor. He and Domna were getting nowhere; she refused to see, as if it were deliberately, the real dynamite in the case.
“Domna,” he said wearily, turning around from the window. “Can’t you see that what you are suggesting means dismissal for cause, blacklisting? Have you ever read the morals clause in the code on faculty tenure? You mustn’t ever mention this letter or even think of it again, even if you should come to hate me like the others. As for Cathy, she has been told that the letter is not to be spoken of—for the very reasons you cite. Perhaps, even, she knows me well enough to have half guessed the truth behind it—and to keep her guess to herself, a lesson to all wives.” He paced in silence for a moment, with a musing, deliberative air. “What you’re after, of course, is motive. Hoar’s motive, naturally—how has he been tempted to do this, knowing Cathy’s condition? I can enlighten you if you want, at the cost of losing your sympathy.” He stood smiling down at the girl, who had dropped without a word into her swivel-chair; nothing moved in her but her eyes, which looked up at him, mesmerized with instinctive fear, like an animal’s. “But first let me hint this, Domna—you are somewhat too bornée in your thinking. There is something in you, perhaps an upper-class habit, that keeps you, with your excellent mind and remarkable analytic powers, from making what one might define as the necessary metaphysical leap, the two plus two making five that Dostoievsky speaks of.” The girl nodded, almost joyously; she understood what he meant. “For example,” he proceeded, in a style that was purposefully leisured, “your very search for motive lacks creative imagination. You are looking in private places, while the answer is staring you in the face, from the newspapers, the radio, the forum. Domna, we are at war, though apparently you only realize it when you are reading your morning newspaper. You imagine that the war is located in the dispatches of correspondents, but it is also here, on this campus.”
The girl’s eyes flew wide open; did she begin at last to see what he was driving at? How much, he asked himself, was it necessary to tell her to send the point home irrefutably? “But leave that for the moment. Let us return to your thinking. As an intellectual exercise, the broad jump we’ve been speaking of, try putting the question that is bothering you in the form of a declarative statement: ‘Knowing of Cathy’s condition, Hoar has been tempted to do this.’ ”
Domna caught her breath. He moved closer to her and slipped into the chair by her side, feeling a curious, reckless excitement as his full intention became clear to him. He picked up the hem of her smock and played with it in his fingers, rubbing the grain of the raw silk against the whorls of his flesh. Then he began to speak very rapidly. “There’s another aspect of the case that I ought to have told you about. Something you may have guessed or may not have. You may not want any part of me when you hear the truth.” He could see her pointed breasts rise and fall with her quickened breathing; she moved slightly away from him, but he maintained his hold on her smock. “Does your Russian second sight tell you?” he murmured. She shook her head stubbornly, and the dark, shining hair, as usual, fell into her eyes. “Well, then,” he declared, squaring his stooped shoulders, “I must tell you that I am and have been for ten years a member of the Communist Party.”
A low cry escaped her. “You!” she protested, and when he nodded gravely she burst out, all a-frenzied. “I can’t believe it. I shan’t believe it. I refuse. It’s not like you. You are not political. You are a-political, the last man I have known of whom this could be true.” Henry sat smiling through this tantrum. “You think, then, that Maynard is right to fire me?” he inquired in a satiny voice. Domna recovered herself. “No,” she said slowly, “no.” She straightened herself thoughtfully and brushed the lock of hair back from her eyes. “No,” she reiterated yet another time. “I will stand by what I have always said. No one should be fired for mere belief; indoctrination is another matter.” She had the air of reciting a lesson to firm it mechanically in her memory, and her gaze distantly rested on him as though to firm him in it too. “But I cannot feel the same to you,” she appended in a formal tone. “Am I another man, then, than I was five minutes ago?” “Yes,” she promptly answered. “You have lied to me and to everyone.” Henry tugged a little on the smock, as if to recall his need to her; her downrightness had impressed him very favorably. He coughed.
“Once again you are too hasty, my dear. I would not have confessed to you if I were not at this moment an archenemy of the Party, one of those unfortunate prisoners of the Party you have read about in your newspaper who lack the courage to break, who live in fear of denunciation by some comrade who suspects us of backsliding, who are forced to perjure themselves on the witness-stand or see their families starve. Fifteen years ago, in a momentary enthusiasm, I joined the Party and since then I’ve had no rest, no respite, no night’s unbroken sleep; I’ve been fired from five universities on various academic pretexts, never knowing who was responsible, the jealous head of the department, a student I’ve awarded an E to, or a comrade teacher to whom I’d spoken too frankly my real opinion of the Party.
“Looking back on it now, I see that I might have gotten out quietly during the Yalta period, as many others did, but I feared exposure too much, teaching in a conservative college with a Catholic president and dean. Had I broken at that time, I could not know that I would not be expelled and my name printed in the Daily Worker; this actually happened to many teachers in my unit. At any rate, I was afraid. Very possibly, I am a coward. In any event, once I had lied to my superiors as to my affiliations—under orders, of course, but also for my own skin—I was done for, the Party had me. I have been useful to them from time to time in various little undercover jobs, and they content themselves with merely terrorizing me in the interests of some future big job, if they are driven underground, say, and they need a respectable front or merely a letter-drop.” His lips tightened in a short, bitter smile. “So, Domnatchka, you see, I have taken refuge in my irony, in the peculiarity of my position, a Communist in name only, like a wife of the same brand, allowed to go my own way, so long as I keep up the observances and pay my protection-money to the Bridges Defense Committee, the Committee for the Hollywood Ten (there but for the grace of God), the Trenton Six, and so forth. A unique life in No Man’s Land, a target for both sides.” Domna impulsively took his hand. “But you are not a Communist,” she reassured him. “It is all very simple. You have only to get up and say so, here in a progressive college, and we will all protect you.”
Henry shook his head. “Too late,” he insisted. “Too late for anyone to break today who will not play the role of stool-pigeon or police-informer. You forget that I have perjured myself before my superiors and before a state legislature—an indictable offense. No one will protect us exes in America unless we also become antis, unless we are willing to wear the shoes of a Budenz or a Miss Bentley and denounce former comrades, many of whom, my dear, are very likely in my own position. No, thank you, Domna.” He rose from his chair and stretched himself. “Ite missa est, or in Church Slavonic, get out, Mulcahy, you’re finished.” Domna took a swift breath and put out a hand to detain him. “You feel certain that Maynard knows?” she said with a troubled face. “You feel sure that that is the reason?” “What else?” he remarked lightly. “As is common knowledge on the campus, two gentlemen from the F.B.I. paid a call to Jocelyn last week. A purely social visit, you think?” Wheeling suddenly, he approached the desk with a complete change of mien. “You see it all now, don’t you?” he demanded in a breathy, sibilant voice. “The heat is on Maynard to get rid of me. I have become a political liability, and he will use any pretext to get rid of me before my name appears in a congressional investigation. And I myself—what a superb irony—have furnished him with just the lever he needs to slide me out quietly, without controversy—Cathy’s heart condition. Very considerately, he notifies me well in advance of the termination of my contract, smoothly bypasses the department, and leaves it up to me to find other employment before I dare tell Cathy that we’re moving on to pastures new.” In the mounting excitement of the last words, he felt his head exultantly whirling; speed and the impediment of his lisp made him salivate copiously as he spoke. “What would you think now,” he brought out, “if I put it to you: ‘knowing of Cathy’s condition, Hoar has been tempted to do this’?” Domna slowly raised her eyes. “I would think as you do,” she acceded in a low, unwilling voice.
She rose from her desk summarily and tore a slip of paper from her memo pad, on which from time to time during the last five minutes she had been scribbling a list of some kind which his eyes had been mistrustfully glancing toward without being able to read. Now, with bated breath, he watched her take off the smock and put on her coat; she looked very smart, trim, and handsome, and he scarcely dared ask her what she was planning to do. “You’re going to see Maynard?” he finally ventured. Domna shook her head. “Too early for that. As you say, this is not a private matter. Maynard must be faced with it in the open, insofar as we can do that and protect you and Cathy at the same time. You don’t mind, do you, if I date your last active membership back a few years, say, before you were investigated by the legislature?” “Whatever you think best,” he acquiesced gratefully; their roles, he perceived, had changed again, and it was better so for the moment. “But what?” he nevertheless queried, in some real mystification. She flashed the list before his eyes, rather gaily, and he was able to read on it the names of six colleagues, with notes and questions opposite each, written in violet ink in her large European hand.
“Your sympathizers,” she tersely remarked.