MULCAHY WAS not much impressed. “You let him pull the wool over your eyes,” was the verdict he returned to Domna that same evening in his car, when he came to fetch her for the chicken supper that Cathy, despite his remonstrances, had spent the bulk of the day preparing. “You aren’t supposed to know,” he pointed out to Cathy, as he gloomily observed the festive preparations: the silver-polish brought out, books dusted, pictures straightened; even the photograph of Joyce’s death-mask received a sweep of the dust-rag. “What will she think of all this?” he demanded, running the vacuum-cleaner, borrowed from the next-door neighbor, over the tan living-room rug with its dark-brown border. “The house stinks of fatted calf.” But Cathy, self-contented, had simply gone on humming a love-ballad. “You old fuddydud,” she finally teased him, dropping a kiss on his tiny bald spot, as he sat slumped on the davenport, staring into space, “do I have to have a special reason for keeping a nice house?” And she smacked the green cushions on either side of him, singing the trashy ballad, a suspiciously recent favorite with her, that she had got out of one of the children’s songbooks: “ ‘Oh, what care I for my house and my land? What care I for my-y-y treasure-oh? What care I for my new-wedded lord?’ ” Patting her back hair, she glided out to the kitchen, leaving him with a bottle of Windex and instructions to polish the glass tray on top of the coffee-table. In the back of the house, the children were being read to by a sitter at fifty cents an hour.
It was not so much, he assured himself, that he feared Domna’s guessing. He had been crediting her with normal intelligence and assuming that, of course, she knew by this time and was simply going through the forms as he was: did she suppose Cathy was deaf to what was said on the telephone? What got under his skin was the unseasonableness of this celebration: the way the two women, separately, but in perfect unison, had leapt to the conclusion that it was all settled and done with, when Maynard, as far as he could see, had yielded nothing but a vague promise to think it over. Every jangled nerve in his body warned him against accepting this formula; as he drove off to return the sitter and get Domna, he was fully conscious of the dangers attending a premature détente. So much so, that he was half tempted to disobey orders and not stop at the liquor-store for the bottle of whiskey decreed by Cathy, since Cathy, though she would not admit it, had a poor head for liquor and had begun to take all too readily to these little nips with Domna that now seemed to be the order of the day. But, thanks to his fear of displeasing her and setting off some sort of scene, the bottle was in the seat beside him when he called for Domna and learned from her reluctant lips the tell-tale fact that she had been suppressing: Maynard, it turned out, had led the conceited pair through the interview without once permitting a mention of the only issue that counted!
He caught his breath when he heard it, and only his feelings as a host prevented him from letting her have it, straight out, in the car. He drew on his reserves of magnanimity and spoke to her with patience, as he had learned to do with the children, analyzing a process step by step, taking into account their slower rate of learning; the drive home seemed to him endless and at the same time too short. “It’s a dead give-away, Domna,” he expatiated. “Analyze it out for yourself. Assume Maynard was ignorant, when he fired me, of my Party record—something I don’t concede for a moment but which seems to appeal to your generous heart. Is it likely that his pal, Furness, whom you insisted on taking into your confidence, wouldn’t have rushed around to inform him the minute he heard the news? Not ’arf likely, is it?” he gloated, unable to keep a thrust of plebeian malice from his tone. “Henry, I’ve thought of that,” said Domna, in her low, restive, bien élevé voice. “It’s strange. I can’t explain it.” “I can explain it very well,” he asserted. “Having got his briefing from your friend, Howard, he met the two of you with a well-prepared story. Don’t imagine that a single word of that interview was extemporized; every gesture, every pause, I’ll wager, was rehearsed before a mirror, and all very carefully calculated to steer you away from the main point. Why, he took you through that session like a regular Intourist guide with a party of dumb fellow-travelers. One direct question from either of you, and Maynard’s goose would have been cooked. You had him on the ropes and you didn’t know it. The bloody fool’s scared to death, Domna; he can’t afford to have a charge of bias made; his whole career of straddling is at stake. He’s a corpse, a well-preserved corpse, rotten with inner corruption, pourri, my girl, pourri—one breath of fresh air, and he’d stink, like the estimable Father Zossima. Don’t think he doesn’t know it.” He turned up the hill into his driveway and lowered his voice as he did so; the elucidation of his topic was banishing his first irritation; he began to feel content, as though everything were back in its place. “As a matter of fact,” he descanted, “Maynard proved to you by his silence that he had something to hide. Put yourself in his place. If he were innocent, and Howard came running to him with the charges, what would be his natural reaction? He wouldn’t wait ten days to blarney you. He’d have you and me too on the carpet inside of sixty minutes to demand a retraction pronto. Right? Of course he would.” He headed the car into the garage and jerked on the brake with emphasis. “Why say with such offhandedness,” he prodded her, “ ‘we all know Hen is no Communist,’ when nobody has mentioned the possibility, if not to put a denial into the record?” He switched off the lights and the motor but made no move to get out. From the other end of the breezeway, through the open door of the dark garage, they heard Cathy’s voice thinly calling, “Hen, is it you? Have you got Domna with you?” He tooted the horn, their signal, and listened for the door to close. “You see,” he said swiftly, “it’s the same thing with Cathy and her heart. Do you suppose Furness didn’t tell him all about it and yet, according to you, Maynard put on a bland face and pretended great shock and surprise. He couldn’t let you know that Furness had been talking.” To his annoyance, the garage-lights came on; Cathy, in the kitchen, he supposed, was manifesting impatience. “Hadn’t we better go in?” urged Domna. “Cathy must be wondering. . . .”
Obediently, he got out and hurried round the car to help her, but his lips, in their solicitous smile, stiffened with mistrust and umbrage. What, he would like to be told, had transpired from the interview that made her so anxious now to be rid of him, to hurry off into the house and avert further questions and discussion? He had guessed, straight off, as soon as he saw her, that she had learned something that discredited him slightly in her judgment, but not too much, apparently—else she would not be here. Obviously—he felt satisfied on this point—it had nothing to do with his “confession,” for how could she have discovered anything to impugn that, when the topic had never been broached? Yet there was something, he thought, tightening his guiding fingers on her elbow, and congratulating himself on his acute sensibility, that made her draw away from him a little, even while she smiled and deferred to him—some little thing, perhaps, that failed to jibe with Maynard’s account of things and on which, naturally, without hesitation, like a true friend, she had taken Maynard’s word. Why all this sudden concern lest Cathy “wonder”? Was it simply a feint to get away from him or was there a rebuke to his carelessness behind it?
Watching the two women kiss in the kitchen doorway, he frowned and shook his head, as a warning, over Domna’s shoulder. Cathy, in his critical view, was going much too far in trying mutely to convey to Domna her gratitude and happiness over this morning’s interview. Woman-like, in fact, she had been picking at him all day, ever since Domna’s telephone call, for not treating his supporters properly, not showing sufficient gratitude, and so on; she had even been at him to “tell” Domna, with the usual wifely implication that she understood the girl better than he did. The love of taking needless risks was something in the feminine temperament that he did not pretend to explicate.
He helped Domna off with her rubbers and hurried her into the living room, leaving Cathy in the kitchen to put the dumplings into the pot. On the table by the davenport was a doily and a plate of involuted pink-and-white sandwiches in the shape of pinwheels that Cathy had got out of some fancy cookbook or other. He eyed them with disfavor and sampled one. In the back bedroom, baby Stephen was crying, which told the whole story of the day. Red-haired Eileen, wearing her best dress, with her dirty underpants hanging down, approached, made a curtsey to Domna, and snatched a sandwich from the plate; Mary Margaret, the eldest, in middy and skirt, followed and, without taking any notice of Domna, marched up and gave her sister a slap. The children, he supposed, had been fed while he was absent on scraps of bread and colored cheese; they were accustomed to eating with their parents and wore looks of sullen suspicion as they watched their father and Miss Rejnev raise their old-fashioned glasses to each other. When Miss Rejnev set her glass down, Eileen’s fingers darted into it and came up with the cherry. In the girls’ bedroom, Nora, the three-year-old, who had been put to bed by her sisters, set up a howl to go to the bathroom; he flew down the corridor and whisked her out of bed too late. The ammonia-smell of urine in the back rooms, owing to the pads drying out on the radiators, was pungently noticeable to him, for the first time in many weeks—no vacuum-cleaner or furniture wax had penetrated this area. He twitched his nose and searched in the bureau for a clean pad; finding none, he settled for a dry one, which he arranged under the child, who put her soft face up to him for a kiss. “Daddy’s girl,” he murmured, stroking the silky head. Pity for himself and his children became, as he stood there in the darkness, hearing the women’s voices, a sort of pride and militancy. He felt gravely offended with Cathy for her betrayal of their anti-bourgeois ethic—had all their years together at the kitchen-table with the teapot between them on the oilcloth been a sham and a sacrifice to her that she could so readily turn her back on them and follow the Pied Piper down the road of least resistance?
He knew the signs all too well, having catalogued them, together with Cathy, in a dozen faculty-wives of their acquaintance: first, cocktails, cocktail napkins, inedible fancy sandwiches, the children shoved into the background, the dinner hour receding farther and farther into the night, then pressure-cookers, dish-washers, deep-freezers, an unending procession of sitters groping their way into the upstairs region as into some segregated ghetto, and downstairs, answering the door, a neighboring farm-girl in cap and uniform with tin buckles on her shoes—“May I take your wraps?”—fraternization with the local gentry, the Episcopal lawn fete, the deadly round of entertaining, domestic hatred, hangovers, name-spending, literary revivals, fawning on imported celebrities, the publisher’s contract at last for an anthology of the literature of the Crisis, the invitation to lecture to a book group, traveling expenses, padded, the bottle in the suitcase, the professor’s wife from Pennsy, “Jesus, what a head!” He closed the door softly and went in to see Stephen, who had lost his pacifier, an old teething-ring that had served the little girls before him. Finding it where it had fallen on the rag rug, he wiped it off with his handkerchief and tucked it in the fat clenched fist. Stephen’s cries halted; he gurgled—a series of luscious primal sounds. He was waiting for the Irish air that his mother was wont to croon to him, and Mulcahy, whose voice was tuneless, struck up instead with “Mulligan’s Ball.” There was sorrow in the jig for Mulcahy; he was minded of Joyce’s household and the gloomy fate of the children—did Nora Joyce, like Cathy, look back in her splendid years of exile to the lost Sodom of infantile satisfactions, the “toy fair” of material civilization that her husband had wrenched her away from? The child, however, laughed contentedly. Mulcahy went out.
In the kitchen, he found Cathy, red-faced, drinking her second cocktail; wisps of hair protruded from the brown bun at the nape of her neck; there was a rich smell of burning from the oven, where the chocolate bread-pudding had bubbled over. In the living room, Domna was reading to the two children; the plate of sandwiches was nearly empty. He sent them off to bed rather sharply and refilled Domna’s glass. The single drink, he discovered, had loosened his tongue a little and removed the inhibitions he put on his curiosity. “You know, Domna,” he said to her, pulling up a chair to her and taking the picture-book from her lap, “I’ve the feeling you’re keeping something back from me. What did Maynard tell you this morning that you’re afraid to tell me?” Domna’s brilliant eyes slid away from him; she reached into her pocketbook for her cigarettes and her lighter. “Do you know,” he said, as if idly, “whenever you’re uncomfortable you reach for a cigarette?” She smiled uncertainly, “Do I?” and then added, swiftly, with an air of taking a plunge, “It’s you, Henry, who make me uncomfortable. You demand so many particulars. I’ve given you the gist, I promise you.” A queer hesitant light flickered in her eyes. “Since you wish to know, I’ll admit to you: certain things in the past, Maynard recalls differently. He doesn’t remember that you told him of the state of Cathy’s health.” Henry shrugged. “Naturally not,” he remarked. “You’ve got it balled up yourself. I didn’t tell him; I told Esther.” “So I said,” blurted Domna, with an after-look of guilty consternation. “He says he doesn’t recall this. He says he received the impression that Cathy had been ill but was better.” She raised her eyes and confronted him and then looked quickly away. Was she “giving him his chance” to contradict this or bring his own story into line? He was not such a fool, he could assure her, as to rake up all that old business which lay too far in the past for anybody to swear positively to what had been said and what hadn’t. “A convenient memory,” he said lightly. “It’s possible that Maynard persuaded himself, even then, to hear what he wished to hear. I don’t hold it against him; we all tell lies to ourselves.” “Sans doute,” agreed Domna, with a sly face. “But now that he’s been told, Henry, he’ll do the right thing, I’m sure of it.” Henry made an irritable grimace; he flexed a muscle in his cheek. “Please,” he begged. “I’m older than you. I’ve seen more of the world and its administrators. The leopard doesn’t change its spots.”
“Domna may be right.” The loud words came out a little furrily. Cathy, without their hearing it, had slipped out of the kitchen behind them and was standing in the doorway arch with an eggbeater in her hand. They wheeled around to look at her; Henry winged a prayer to God. “You weren’t there, Hen,” insisted Cathy. “How can you be so sure?” There was a fearful pause; the eggbeater dripped cream onto the carpet. As she digested Domna’s expression of horror, Cathy began to laugh. “I don’t know what I’m talking about,” she said gaily. “I must be a little tiddly. Didn’t I hear you say something about Maynard? I thought Domna went to see him this morning about a salary raise.” “She did, darling,” said Henry. “You’re quite right. We were discussing it. I told Cathy all about it, Domna; you don’t mind, do you, if I let out our little secret?” His wife’s eyes grew drunken again. “I think you’ve been wonderful, Domna, just wonderful,” she said with feeling. “We all need that raise so badly.” “I’ve done nothing,” said Domna, rather shortly. Henry bit his lip. “Dinner’s in just a minute,” said Cathy. She turned and slowly exited toward the kitchen. Henry followed her. “Why did you do it?” he whispered in a fury. He took her cocktail glass from the kitchen table and threw the contents into the sink. “She knows,” he despairingly exulted and struck the table a blow. “She doesn’t know,” replied Cathy, airily. “I carried it off very well, I thought.” Henry came closer to her. “She has good manners,” he said in her ear, vindictively. “She won’t call you a liar to your face. She’ll ignore it till she gets out of here and then, excuse her dust! I watched her. She was vibrating all over like a plucked string.” His eyes swept over the table set in the dinette off the kitchen with Cathy’s wedding silver and an old lace table-cloth. “Why did you do it?” he repeated. “I’ve warned you again and again to be careful. How many drinks did you have?” “Two,” retorted Cathy, determined to brazen it out. “I’m not drunk. I was just playing drunk to cover myself. Listening to you laying down the law. I simply lost my head and forgot that I wasn’t supposed to know. It could happen to anybody. It’s all your fault anyway, Hen,” she continued, with a sharpening and sobering of her features, as she spooned the dumplings out, one by one, efficiently, and set them out on the big platter. “I told you you ought to tell her. You’re too conspiratorial in your methods.” “Do you still think so?” he said with breathless sarcasm. “I’ll tell you why you did it. You hate to be left out of anything. You couldn’t stand the idea that these discussions were going on every day and you were supposed to be kept in the dark. You resented the implication that you were stupid and didn’t have the mother-wit to guess your husband’s troubles. And you’re jealous of my relation with Domna. You want to have her all cosy to yourself with your lace tablecloths and your confidences. You’re dying for an aristocratic friendship. Everything has changed here since you met her; the children are neglected; you have to be driven into York to the hairdresser; you’re dieting and yet you want to have wine with your meals. You lie in the bathtub and feel your breasts in the mirror; you use French expressions. You’re a beautiful natural woman and all of a sudden you want to be a femme du monde, a vulgar femme de trente ans in the style of Maupassant.”
Cathy’s eyes sparkled; she tilted her angular chin complacently—these sudden and secret quarrels between them she took for a manifestation of worship. She picked up the loaded platter, strewed it with parsley, balanced it on a pile of plates and proceeded grandly with it into the dinette. A vapor of steam followed her, tantalizing him, like one of the veils of Salome. “Dinner is served,” she announced, sliding the plates onto the table. “Go and get her, you fool.” She readjusted a hairpin and sat coolly down at her place; next to her, stood her old tea-wagon, recently exhumed from the basement, stacked with dessert-plates and a coffee-service. Henry hurried back into the living room. “Cathy’s not quite herself,” he apologized. “I was afraid for the moment she’d heard something disturbing. But it’s all right; I’ve been talking to her. She has no conception of what she seemed to be saying. It’s a lucky thing I gave her that salary-raise story as a blind. Whew!” He made a half-laughing motion of wiping the sweat from his brow, and when she did not smile back, he grew serious. “Alcohol isn’t good for her. That’s why we seldom serve it. There’s a little history of that kind in her family—the curse of the Irish.” He held out his hands. “Come! She’ll be better when she’s had something to eat.” Domna put down the quarterly she had been gripping. “Would you rather I didn’t stay?” she said abruptly. She appeared exceedingly tense and disturbed. Henry shook his head with decision. “What a scare you must have had,” he said warmly. “I could see it. You turned a sort of yellow—your Tartar blood, I’ll warrant. You still look a little queer. Can I get you something more to drink?” Domna gave a quick, strained smile. She rose. “No. I’m all right.” He led her into the dinette. “What a wonderful dinner, Cathy,” she murmured, looking at the table, but the tribute escaped her mechanically; she seemed to fix her eyes on the flatware and napery with the same hypnotized effort that dragged her fork to her lips and back again. She ate, observed Henry, like a stupefied goose of Périgord subjected to forced feeding; indeed, her whole demeanor was that of a creature in a vise.
Cathy, however, had recovered her poise; she led the conversation and they discussed theories of love. “What you love in a person, Domna,” she explained to her, “is his essence, not the dross of appearance. Love is the discovery of essence.” Domna looked up from her bread-pudding. “I think you are too dualistic,” she said, brusquely. “Even in Plato, essence is perceived through existence. There is no gross contradiction, no belying. Shadow is a partial aspect of substance. Appearances intimate to us; they do not flatly deceive.” She put down her spoon. Henry affably nodded. “You’re a handsome girl, Domna,” he reminded. “All handsome people are monists. For the rest of us, there is always the temptation to gnosticism. What we are is not what we see in the mirror, and we know therefore that appearances are fickle. We look to somebody else to discover our imperishable essence.” He smiled uxoriously at Cathy and wiped his lips with his damask napkin. “She,” he signified, “has been good enough to do me this service. Could you love a leper, Domna?” he continued, musingly. “I wonder whether you could. I think, if you did, you would love the leper in him, from defiance, and not seek to discover what there is in him that the loathsome disease hides. That is, you would love in defiance what the world sees and hates, and your love would be simply an affirmation of repugnance overcome.” That he repelled Domna physically he had known for some time, without rancor and even with a kind of objective, scientific interest, and he observed once again, with detachment, seeing her drop her eyes in embarrassment, that this repugnance he now calmly alluded to was still the strongest hold he had on her: was it feasible, he asked himself, to try to exercise the same attraction-repulsion in the moral sphere? He saw that she understood very well the drift of the conversation, which, he had to concede, had been splendidly maneuvered by Cathy to come athwart the subject at hand. Domna’s fine nostrils indented; she raised her brows in distaste. “Why are you R.C.’s so fascinated by leprosy, like children? It is all simply a bogey of legend and crude mass superstition. But in answer to your question: if you mean a moral leper, no. Fair without and foul within has no charm for me. Nor the reverse, for that matter. One must love in depth. I cannot be interested in people whose inside contradicts their outside. Such people have neither essence nor existence.” She folded her napkin. “I must work tonight,” she declared.
Cathy warmly protested. “It’s a holiday,” she reproached her. “We can have a good long gab. No students, no classes, no convocation. You don’t really have to work.” “I have papers to do,” said Domna, with a sidelong glance at Henry, “and achievement sheets to get in.” Yet she stayed, when pressed, and helped wash up the dishes as usual. Henry saw plainly that she was ashamed for them but that this very shame, also, was preventing her from making a difference in their relation. Certain acutely telling little things, however, betrayed her reluctance to be any longer “at home” here; she made a show, for example, of not knowing where to put the china and glassware, though she had helped wash up a dozen times before and knew the cupboards like the palm of her hand. In the past, too, she had busied herself wiping the tables and counters; she would get out the broom and sweep the floor and sometimes even set the table for breakfast, putting a silly glass ornament in the middle and pleating the children’s napkins. But tonight she was irking to get away; she dried the dishes at top speed, like a kitchen worker in a hash house, and was off to get her coat on before the sink was emptied. Henry drove her home, with a sick, empty feeling, as at the end of something, knowing that she knew and that she knew that he knew that she knew. If she turned on him, the others would follow her; they had all been looking for an excuse to lose faith in him, and one apostasy would be ample to show the others the way. And at the moment, he blamed himself completely for what had happened; he felt humbled for his lack of trust in her and let himself grovel in the feeling with penitent abandon—all of which he tried to convey to her at the ultimate moment on her doorstep, in a fervid, miscreant’s handclasp and a quick, blind turning away. To admit culpability was to open the way to amendment, he repeated to himself on the way home, and he was tempted suddenly to appear at her door and make a full confession; yet he knew at the same moment that it was too late—his confession should have preceded Cathy’s slip if it were to have any air of bona fides. What more, he asked himself, could he tell her in words than he had already indicated wordlessly? Words and explanations had no place in true friendship, which was a connexion of souls. Had he need to beg her in words not to give him away, when eye and lip and hand beseeched her higher understanding? Moreover, he thought, with a sudden dry cackle, she dared not tell on them—anybody she confided in would think her an utter fool and a turncoat.
John Bentkoop and his wife, Virginia, were in their night-clothes when Domna cranked the old bell. He came downstairs, blinking and pulling on his bathrobe, followed by Virginia in a pink woolen dressing-gown. She would not let him open the door until he turned on the flashlight and they saw through the side-panes the Russian girl standing on the porch. Virginia, who was a sensible girl, instantly drew her into the dark house, put an arm around her and guided her into the living room. She had met her only once, at a college lecture, but she divined correctly that her feet were wet. John hastily made a fire. Domna sat crouched on a hassock by the fireplace; she would not take off her shoes or her polo coat at the beginning, apologizing that she had been pacing outside the house for hours, trying to make up her mind whether to intrude on them, and would go at once when she had said what she had to say. After the first few words, Virginia absented herself; she came back with a pot of coffee and big, white, cheap cups on a tray, served them, and sat down by the oil lamp in a rocker—there was no electricity in the house. “You must stay,” she proffered. “I’ve made up a bed upstairs. I’ve always wanted to know you. Next year, I’m going to take your course.” Without further parlance, she took up her knitting, a pale green baby sweater; the motion of her needles kept pace with the conversation. She had pale, almost greenish fair hair, pale sea-like green eyes, a pink and white complexion, fair brows, delicate hands; everything about her was pastel and tranquilly decided—in short, she was the complement of Domna, whom she scanned with earnest attention, as though the other girl were something—a flower, a chemical process—she had read about in a book and she was now satisfying herself as to her reality. This child-like faculty of attention was her notable characteristic; nothing appeared to strike her as aberrant in a world that was myriad with difference; she looked at her husband carefully whenever he made a point, as though studying afresh the whorls of his personality. Before the discussion was over, she had finished the sweater, laid it aside in a basket and begun casting a new set of stitches on the yellow needles. Toward the end, when it was nearly morning, she added her voice to the symposium. This voice, surprisingly, was rather clear and loud, like a boy’s voice that has not changed yet.
John threw another log on the fire and paced up and down before it. “I think, Domna,” he said judiciously, “you’re doing him a minor injustice. It doesn’t seem to me likely that they cooked it up between them, as you say. More likely she half guessed and he told her. I’m willing to buy that for what it’s worth.” Domna’s shadowed face showed a faint stirring of relief; as she listened, she slipped her coat from her shoulders and Virginia silently came and took it. “I’ve never put much credence,” continued John, easily, like a wound-up bobbin unreeling, “in Hen’s power to keep a secret. To the best of my knowledge, he told one of his tutees the very first thing, probably before he told you. If he hadn’t told Cathy finally, she would have been one of the few people in the community he didn’t favor with his confidence. The town’s buzzing with it; I heard it from the garage-man and the grocer and the druggist, all very concerned about Mrs. Mulcahy and about Mr. Mulcahy’s prospects for paying their precious bills. Why, I think Hen could get up a real rank-and-file movement among the tradespeople here to petition for his continuance.” He laughed but Domna sighed restlessly. “I would pay them myself to be rid of him,” she declared in a passionate tone. John studied her concernedly, with a pursing of the large lips. “You’re really suffering,” he discovered. “Drink some more coffee. It’s mainly shock, you know. You’re one of the few people on this campus that really had faith in Hen. It’s a shame it had to be you to discover this. Those of us who’ve known him a little longer would have been better prepared.” “Oh, that dinner!” she suddenly moaned, as it came back to her. “They talked about love, Virginia. ‘Could I love a leper?’ ” “Could you?” asked Virginia, setting the cup in her hand. “I don’t think so,” said Domna. “Neither could I,” said Virginia. “At least, I never have.” “But what I was supposed to understand by this,” said Domna, raising her eyes to John, “was that Henry was a moral leper and that I didn’t love him sufficiently. Of course, it’s perfectly true. I don’t. Not sufficiently for this.” Her face stiffened. There was a silence. “Did you really suspect it?” she demanded, in a different, half-hopeful tone. “Honor bright,” said John. “Ask Virginia.” Virginia paused in her knitting. “Yes, he did. You aren’t married or you’d see how hard it is to keep something from your wife.” “And you really think,” insisted Domna, “that it wasn’t cooked up, deliberately, beforehand, as a bid for sympathy?” John shook his long head. “That’s not how these things work, Domna; one begins by persuading oneself, and this germ of persuasion is infectious. Hen has a remarkable gift, a gift for being his own sympathizer. It’s a rare asset; it could be useful to him in politics or religion.” He spoke with perfect seriousness. “He’s capable of commanding great loyalty, because he’s unswervingly loyal to himself. I’m not being sarcastic. Very few of us have that. It’s a species of self-alienation. He’s loyal to himself, objectively, as if he were another person, with that feeling of sacrifice and blind obedience that we give to a leader or a cause. In the world today, there’s a great deal of free-floating, circumambient loyalty that fixes itself on such people, who seem to offer, by their own example, the possibility of a separation from the self that will lead to a higher union with the self objectified in an idea. It’s Hen’s fortune or his fate to have achieved this union within his own personality; he’s foregone his subjectivity and hypostatized himself as an object.”
He settled himself on the hearth-rug and wound his arms round his long, bony legs in their white pajama bottoms. Virginia laid down her knitting and joined him; she rested her head on his shoulder. The fire threw a ruddy light on the three absorbed faces, as in a painting by La Tour. Around them, outside the circle of the lamp, the room was nearly dark: they might have been sitting by a campfire on a chill beach after a night picnic, or in a forest-clearing, keeping watch. The even heat of the fire in their faces, the lateness of the hour, the shadows, the rattling of the small-paned windows, the eeriness of the man they spoke of, produced a sensuous content and numbness; they felt close to the primeval mysteries, the chiaroscuro of good and evil. John hugged his knees. His olive student-face assumed a didactic mien. “The criteria of truth and falsity, as we know them, don’t exist for Hen. He doesn’t examine his statements from the point of view of the speaker but from the point of view of the listener. He listens to himself as you or I might listen to him and asks himself, ‘Is it credible?’ Even in private soliloquy, credibility is the standard he applies; that is, he looks at truth with the eyes of a literary critic and measures a statement by its persuasiveness. If he himself can be persuaded he accepts the moot statement as established. This is real alienation. In the critical part of his mind, he’s extraordinarily cold with himself, cold and dedicated. Hence his incessant anxiety, like the anxiety of a military commander or an author or a stage-director; he’s busy with problems of reception, stage effects, cues, orchestration; his inner life is a busy rehearsal and testing for activity on the larger stage of tomorrow, where the audience, as usual, will miss the finer points. Immersed in all these difficulties, hung up on the little snags of production, he’s impatient, understandably, with outside interrogation. ‘Is it true?’ you want to know, but the question’s irrelevant and footless. Do you ask an amber spot whether it’s true? Or an aria? At bottom, he doesn’t give a damn, Domna, what you or I think, any more than a general cares about democratic opinion. We’re not his critics or even, primarily, his audience; we’re amateurs whom, unfortunately, he must use in his production, green troops whom he has to put up with since the great Commander we all act under saw fit to send him no better.”
Domna cupped her pointed chin in her hand; she stared reflectively into the blaze. “So,” she pondered finally, “when Cathy guessed or he told her, he had no hesitation in going through with the imposture? He felt justified in doing it since she might have found out and might have been dead by this time for all Maynard cared?” John laughed. “Such might-have-beens are for neophytes,” he said, stretching. “When Cathy found out, Hen as an intelligent man saw that it was simpler that she knew. The worry of protecting her was removed and he was supplied with a consultant he could trust.” He sat up cross-legged on the hearth-rug and conned the two girls’ faces. “Be honest with me, both of you,” he demanded. “What would you have done in his place? Would you actually have interrupted the proceedings to announce that Cathy knew and there was no further worry on her score? Think what it meant to him. What were his chances of being rehired if the college didn’t have Cathy on its conscience? Most people, I’m afraid, would do pretty much as Hen did. What about you, Virginia?” “I really don’t know,” said Virginia, “I like to think I would come out with the truth, but probably I would try to play possum until the matter was settled. I would stay away from my supporters and hope that nobody would ask me.” Domna leaned forward. “Is it conceited of me? I think I would tell the truth.” The taut declaration made a silence. Virginia’s look consulted her husband. She spoke. “You don’t really know, Domna,” she argued. “You’ve never been in the position he is. In your situation, it wouldn’t cost much to tell the truth.” A look of pride glittered in Domna’s face; her nostrils flared. “It costs nothing to tell the truth when one has the habit. One becomes entangled in self-pity and lies.” She drew out the last word with a strong diphthong and sibilant hissing of the s. “He threw himself on our pity. This was not an honest act. He lied to Maynard about Cathy and lied to us about the lie. Or is he lying to us now and she is healthy and it is all a fantasy that we believed?” Heated and gleaming in the firelight, her pure features were almost ugly. “And now we are all in it; we are all lying for him. I lied this morning to the President: my students do not praise Henry—it is I who praise him to the students, who sit with their faces so.” She made an idiot face with sunken jaw and goggling eyes. “I lied tonight at his house, two, three times. I lie to myself about him.” She jumped up and lit a cigarette and stood by the mantelpiece, puffing. “And now what am I to do? I am to lie some more, I presume. You know that I cannot carry this nasty story to the President. I cannot. I tell myself that it’s my duty but I cannot. If Henry had not been my friend, still I could not do it. Do you blame me? And I cannot tell Henry, either, that I know and am not deceived by him. I think this is a weakness. I’m ashamed for him; I cannot face him; I am afraid of him and that terrible white freckled face.” “Undoubtedly, he knows that you know, Domna,” put in John, by way of comfort. Domna flared up. “So what will he do, murder me? Let him do it,” she cried recklessly, striking the mantelpiece a blow. John smiled at these heroics and then grew thoughtful. “He’s more likely to accuse you of something,” he said gravely, after due reflection.
He appeared to consult again with himself. “Look here, Domna,” he finally suggested, “there’s a good deal to be said for Hen on the plus side. You felt it once yourself or you wouldn’t be suffering disillusion. Your friendship wasn’t a deception; Hen is extremely likable in the early stages of an acquaintance. He has a taste for abstract conversation that makes him peculiarly accessible, like some of the old philosophers. He’s interested in ontological questions, which are the great binders of diverse humanity. On some of the better students, he has an extraordinarily tonic effect. To my mind, he’s worth keeping here aside from the question of Cathy and the four children and the bills and all the rest. He has an agile mind and excellent training. What I said at our first meeting is a true statement of what I believe. I think it valuable for the Literature department to have a theist teaching in it. Hen’s brand of theism and mine differ; in his personal life, he may belong to the devil’s party, but the devil is a theist too. What’s needed at Jocelyn or any college is a mind concerned with universals and first principles; the students take to them like catnip if they’re given half a chance. Your department’s monstrously one-sided—you’re concerned with formal questions exclusively: Tolstoy’s method, the method of Virginia Woolf, the elucidation of Mann’s symbols, the patterns of Katherine Anne Porter. All appropriate enough for criticism, but it isn’t what the student reads for. A student reads an author for his ideas, for his personal metaphysic, what he calls, till you people teach him not to say it, his ‘philosophy of life.’ He wants to detach from an author a portable philosophy, like the young Joyce in A Portrait of the Artist—a laudable aim which you discourage by your insistence on the inseparability of form and content.”
“But that is true,” protested Domna, dropping to her knees on the hassock. John shook his head in reprimand. “True, but also not true. And not relevant to the student’s purpose. Content can be paraphrased. What we’re doing here at Jocelyn is a sinister thing for our students; we’re turning out classes of sophisticated literary hollow men, without general ideas, without the philosophy or theology that’s formed in adolescence, without the habit or the discipline of systematic thought. Our students have literally no idea what they think or believe except in questions of taste, and they’ve been taught to fear formulation as a lapse in literary manners. Hen is the one force here that runs counter to this tendency. His Jesuit training formed him in an older mold and his Joyce studies confirmed him in the habit of universalization. Finnegans Wake: one book which shall be all books, the Book of Life.”
Domna interrupted. “John,” she said tensely, “I have to tell you something.” Her pale, severe face was sharp with trepidation, as if she feared being overheard; they moved a little closer. “This is my confession. I think Henry is mad. He comes to see me at night and talks, talks, talks. He has a delusional system centering on Joyce. He speaks of Joyce’s life as a Ministry. He speaks of the Book, the Revelation, the Passion.” John raised his eyebrows. “Most of the Joyce brotherhood are a little batty,” he cautioned. Domna shook her head firmly. “This is different; it’s not an ordinary obsession. He believes that he’s been subject to persecution for propagating the Word. This, he insists, is at the bottom of his troubles; all the rest is pseudepigraphal—that was his own word. He is hated, he says, by Joyce’s enemies, who comprise the whole academic world, with the exception of rival Joyce experts who hate him also, since they are really Joyce’s enemies in disguise.” Virginia laughed delightedly. “How wonderful!” she cried in sincere enjoyment and admiration. Domna laughed also, but more grudgingly. “Yes, it’s funny,” she admitted, “but terrifying, too. You know that stick he carries; he’s put it aside, he says, for the duration of this emergency in token of symbolic burial. His Communist period, he says, was a ritual conversion symbolizing Joyce’s baptism in the religion of naturalism—the precursor. And the Communists hate him because he transcended naturalism, just as they hate Joyce. Behind Joyce, you see, is the identification with Christ. Bloom was Christ; Earwicker was Christ—Henry Mulcahy is Christ in the disguise of Bloom and Earwicker, the family men, the fathers eternal consubstantial with the Son.” The laughter died out of her voice. “I’ve tried to assure myself,” she declared, “that all this is merely an allegory, the pastime of an ingenious mind, that he uses to give form to his experience, to console himself in a rather bitter way by the sense of repetition, but, John, I’m afraid he believes it literally, just as you believe in the Incarnation.”
John’s dark eyebrows knitted; like an upright young judge he seemed to search his experience for precedents and normative explanations. At the same time, with his short black hair standing up, there was something alert and lively about him, like a hare after its quarry: understanding. “Christ’s experience,” he announced finally, with an odd eager smile, “is the great paradigm for the persecution psychosis. It displays the whole classical syndrome: belief in divine origin, special calling, chosenness, the cult of exclusive disciples, betrayal, justification—one might even add, following Freud’s analysis of paranoia, homosexuality, for it’s noteworthy that He not only eschewed women, but that His betrayer was a man. The betrayer for the paranoid is always of his own sex, the loved and feared sex. One could say,” he continued breathlessly, with a sort of awkward ardency, “that by becoming man precisely God underwent what could be described as madness: the experience of unrecognition fusing with the knowledge of godhead, the sense of the Message, the Word, the Seed falling on barren ground, the sense of betrayal and promised resurrection. And like the mad, who use symbolic language, He spoke in parables.” Domna huskily laughed. “Jésus-Christ, c’était un fou qui se croyait Jésus-Christ.” John nodded. “Yes; in so far as He was human, this was his predicament. But is it any wonder that man who seeks in his highest moments to identify himself with God, should do so also in his time of tribulation, in the dark night of the soul. And if Hen is mad, Domna, to choose to imitate Christ, in the pattern of his sufferings, where are all the Thomas à Kempises?”
“You’re playing on words,” she protested. “Though to me, John, to speak frankly, all religious people seem a little mad.” “That’s because you don’t believe in godhead,” he retorted. “You don’t believe in the black reality of the night of separation our friend Hen is undergoing.” The three moved closer to the fire. Domna met John’s eyes. “No,” she said, squarely, “I don’t. Except as a metaphor. But I am willing to pity him if you want.” John firmly shook his head. “You don’t pity him, Domna; you’re ashamed for him; you’ve just told us so yourself.” Domna considered. “I think I feel pity mixed with horror. I should like to avert my eyes. This is not the proper Aristotelian compound, as Henry himself would be the first to say. What is requisite for the tragic spectacle is pity and terror compounded—pity for the tragic victim, terror for oneself, in so far as the victim is oneself, universalized, by extension. But I cannot feel that Henry is myself and I can only feel horror of him. Noli me tangere.” She shuddered. “I had the misfortune to be born into the upper classes and I cannot respond to suffering when the sufferer is base. And it seems to me now—forgive me for saying it—that this arrogant Henry has the soul of a slave. No doubt this cringing soul reflects social conditions; one has only to look at Henry to imagine the matrix that formed him—a poor heredity, hagiolatrous parents, a nasty and narrow environment, sweets, eyestrain, dental caries. I detest the social order which sprouts these mildewed souls—all that should be changed, for everybody; nobody should be permitted to grow up in such a bodily tenement. But there is also in each individual the faculty of transcendence; there is in each of us a limited freedom. I myself have been poor and I am not sentimental about poverty—poor people must be judged, like the rest of us. Poverty has certain favorable aspects: the poor are free of money-guilt and the sophisms and insincerities that go with it. Poverty and bad heredity are not a blanket pardon; need palliates Henry’s behavior but it is not a justification.” “Very true,” agreed John. “But who is to do the judging, Domna? You? I?” She hesitated and then grew reckless. “Yes, I. Why not? I, you, everybody. Everybody who will judge himself has the right to judge others and to be judged also. This abrogation of judgment you practice is an insult to man’s dignity. Everybody has the right to be judged and to judge in his turn. This ‘understanding’ you accord Henry is dangerous, both to him and to you. God is our judge, you will tell me. But there is no God. God is man.” The blasphemous words rang out; the windows rattled; but John seemed unaffected. “God is man, Domna, if you wish,” he said gravely. “But He is not men.”
Domna suddenly looked tired. “No,” she admitted. “I suppose in a certain way I am on your side. If I presume to judge Henry, I don’t presume to punish him. That is not my affair.” She sighed. “And yet I can’t help but feel that I’m implicated in a frightful swindle. When I think of how soundly I rated Dr. Hoar this morning!” She gave an unwilling laugh. “After all, you were in good faith,” said Virginia. “I wonder,” replied Domna. “I think really, in my heart, I knew all along too. I think I hid from myself what I did not want to see. I didn’t dare ask myself what Cathy must be thinking; to ask would have implied an answer I didn’t wish to get. My pride, I imagine, undid me; I could not stand to be wrong.”
John gave the fire a final poke; the last red ember dissolved in a shower of sparks. “Let me console you,” he said abruptly, as though he had been withholding this last piece of information till Domna had spent herself. “I don’t think Cathy’s health had much to do with Maynard’s decision—assuming he made it this morning. What impressed him most was the faculty support for Hen: he hadn’t quite expected it and was relieved, in a way, to find it was there. I think between ourselves, as Maynard would say, that Maynard had a good many qualms about letting Hen go. Quite aside from Cathy, Maynard has a pretty fair idea of the employment picture and he knows as well as the rest of us that Hen’s prospects aren’t too bright. Nobody likes to have the feeling that he may be sending a man with five dependents out onto the relief rolls, and whatever Hen may say of him, Maynard, in his way, is a very decent fellow. The letter he sent Hen may have been something in the nature of a trial balloon, to test faculty reaction. He wasn’t anxious to let Hen go, but on the other hand, he couldn’t keep him in the face of the bursar and the trustees, without some faculty backing. Now he can go to the money-bags and announce that a valued group in the faculty considers that Hen’s departure would be an intellectual loss to the college. That was what he wanted to hear; so long as he had the impression that Hen was an intellectual liability, he couldn’t in fairness to the students argue for retaining him as a teacher. Maynard himself is quite at sea in these cultural matters; he honestly wants to be told who is who and what is what. He meant it when he told us he was grateful to us for our visit—we forced him to take a line he’d been half wanting to take. In a word, we accepted responsibility.”
He got to his feet rather stiffly and solemnly. The fire had died out; it was nearly dawn; a few roosters were crowing; a high-pitched dog barked. “Milking-time,” he said, going to the window. “Time to go to bed.” Virginia lit a candle and let the wax drip into a saucer to fix it; she handed it to Domna, who reluctantly pulled herself up. The word, responsibility, seemed to lie on her shoulders like a burden. John’s practical and reassuring exordium, it appeared, had sunk her into new perplexities. With Virginia in the lead, carrying the oil lamp, they went single file up the stairs, on tiptoe, so as not to wake the baby, whose six o’clock feeding was less than an hour off. In the upstairs hall Domna suddenly detained John. “Responsibility,” she whispered, “what does it mean, we accept responsibility for Henry? Does it mean we underwrite him for one year, or are we stuck for life?” Her candle trembled as she laughed, rather nervously. “For one year, I should think,” said John. “And Communism,” she murmured, “do you still think that had nothing to do with it?” In the darkness, he looked at her rather oddly, with a wry twist of the long jaw, but she could not see this; the flame of her candle lit up only her own face. “No,” he said, stolidly, in his ordinary speaking voice. He gripped her arm and drew her toward him till he could kiss her, dryly, on the forehead. “Sleep well,” he adjured, with a curious creak in his voice. “The sleep of the just.”