HIS GREAT QUALIFICATION was that nobody liked him very much. That is, nobody liked him enough to make a point of him. Consequently, among the married couples he knew, he was universally popular. Since nobody cherished him, swore by him, quoted his jokes or his political prophecies, nobody else felt obliged to diminish him; on the contrary, the husbands or wives of his friends were always discovering in him virtues their partners had never noticed, and a husband who was notorious for detesting the whole imposing suite of his wife’s acquaintance would make an enthusiasm of the obscure Francis Cleary, whom up to that time the wife had seldom thought about. In the long war of marriage, in the battle of the friends, Francis Cleary was an open city. Undefended, he remained immune, as though an inconspicuous white flag fluttered in his sharkskin lapel. The very mention of his name brought a certain kind of domestic argument to a dead stop. (“You don’t like my friends.” “I do too like your friends.” “No, you don’t, you hate them.” “That’s not true,” and—triumphantly—“I like Francis Cleary.”)
A symbol of tolerance, of the spirit of compromise, he came into his own whenever one of his friends married. A man who in his single state had lunched with Francis Cleary once or twice a year would discover to his astonishment, after two or three years of marriage, that Francis Cleary was now his closest friend: he was invited regularly for weekends, for dinner, for cocktail parties; he made the invariable fourth at bridge or tennis. Though he might never have been asked to the wedding ceremony (and in fact it was more usual for the wife to have him introduced to her quite by chance a few months later, in a restaurant, and to experience a kind of Aristotelian recognition—“Why hasn’t Jack ever spoken of you? You must come to dinner next Thursday”), his azalea plant or cyclamen would be the first to arrive at the hospital when the baby was born.
If it was the wife who had originally been Francis Cleary’s friend, the graph of intimacy would follow the same curve. A mild admirer who had always figured in the background of her life, imperceptibly he would have slid to the very center of the composition: he came to stay for two weeks in the summer, played chess with her husband, and took her to dinner when she was alone in town. He had become “your friend Francis Cleary,” a walking advertisement of her husband’s good nature. “How can you say I am jealous?” he would ask. “You had lunch with Francis Cleary only last week.” Left by herself with this old friend, she would—as she had always done—get bored, play the phonograph, make excuses to go to the kitchen to see how the maid was getting along with the hollandaise. Yet at her husband’s suggestion she would invite him again and again, because his presence in the house reassured her, told her that marriage had not really changed her, that she was still free to see her own friends, that her husband was a generous, fair-minded man who could not, naturally, be expected to share every one of her tastes. Moreover, it was so easy to have Francis Cleary. When her real friends came, something unpleasant usually happened—an argument, an ill-considered reference to the past—or if nothing actually happened, she suffered in the expectation of its happening, so that when they finally left she echoed her husband’s “Thank God, that’s over!” in the silence of her heart. A few awkward evenings, a weekend would serve, in most cases, to convince her that the love she felt for her friends was a positive obstacle to her happiness; and she would renounce it, though perhaps only provisionally (telling herself that surely, later on, in precisely the right circumstances Jim would come to see these people as she did—just as she was sure that sometime, next week or next year, Jim would come to like string beans, if she served them to him in a moment of intimacy and with precisely the right sauce). Meanwhile, however, it was certainly better to have Francis Cleary, who was after all a close friend of her real friends (had she not met him through them?), and as the years passed the distinction between her “real” friends and Francis Cleary would blur in her mind and she would imagine that he had always been one of her dearest associates.
His social mobility derived from the fact that he was capable of being used by other people as a symbol, and a symbol not only of an idea (e.g., tolerance) but of an actual person or persons. Thus a husband, drawing up a guest list for an evening party, might remark to his wife, “How about having the Caldwells?” (or the Muellers or the Kaplans). “Oh my God,” his wife would shriek, “do we have to have them?” “I like them.” “They’re awful, and besides they won’t know anybody.” “They’re old friends of mine. I owe them something.” “Have them when I’m away then—you know they can’t stand me.” “Don’t be silly. They’d be crazy about you if you’d give them half a chance.” In desperation, the wife would cast about her. She saw her party, her charming, harmonious, mildly diversified party, heading straight for shipwreck on the rock of her husband’s stubbornness. Then all at once an inspiration would seize her. “Look,” she would say, in a more reasonable tone, “why don’t you ask Francis Cleary instead? He’d get along very well with these other people. And he’s your friend, just as much as Hugh Caldwell is. You’re wrong if you think it’s a matter of the Caldwells’ being your friends. It’s just that they wouldn’t fit in.” And the husband, reading the storm warnings as clearly as she, telling himself that if he insisted on the Caldwells his wife might treat them with impossible rudeness, and that even if she did not, she would make her concession an excuse for filling the house for months to come with her intolerable friends, that he might win the battle but lose the war, would reluctantly, grudgingly, consent. After all, Francis Cleary belonged to the circle of the detested Caldwells. To have him would be to have their spirit if not their substance, and, to be perfectly honest—he would say to himself—wasn’t it the principle of the Caldwells rather than their persons that was the issue at stake?
Another hostess, on slightly better terms with the prospective host, or perhaps merely a better tactician, would begin differently. “Darling,” she would say, looking up from the memorandum pad on which already a few names had been neatly aligned. “I have an idea. Why don’t we ask Francis Cleary?” The air of discovery with which she brought forth this proposal would accord oddly with the fact that they always did have Francis Cleary at their parties, but the husband, who had been fearing something much worse (some old school friend or a marvelous singer she had met at a benefit), would in his relief not notice the anomaly. “All right,” he would say, grateful to her for her interest in this rather dull old business associate, and before he had time to change his mind, she would have telephoned Francis Cleary and secured his acceptance. Then, when the question of the Caldwells was raised, she would pout slightly. “Oh,” she would say, “don’t you think that makes too much of the same thing? After all, we’re having Francis Cleary, and I do think it’s a mistake to have a bloc at a party.” “I don’t know.” “Oh, darling, you remember the time we had all those Italians and they sat in the corner and talked to each other. . . .”
In either case, the outcome was the same. Francis Cleary would appear at the party, representing the absent, unassimilable Caldwells. He was their abstraction, their ghost. Unobtrusive, moderately well bred, he would come early and stay late. He made no particular social contribution, but the host, whenever he glanced in his direction, would feel a throb of solidarity with his own past, and at some point in the evening he and Francis Cleary would have a talk about the Caldwells and Francis would tell him all about Hugh Caldwell’s latest adventure. Not ordinarily a brilliant talker, in this particular field Francis Cleary was unsurpassed. He was a master of the second-hand anecdote, the vicarious exploit. Hugh Caldwell, who suffered dreadfully from asthma and had a distressing habit of choking and gasping in the middle of his sentences, never could have done himself the justice Francis did. In fact, Hugh Caldwell, telling his own stories, interposed an obstacle, a distraction—himself, the living, asthmatic flesh—between the story and the audience. As the movies have supplanted the stage, and the radio the concert hall, so Francis Cleary in modern life tended to supplant his friend, Hugh Caldwell, and in supplanting him, he glorified him. He was the movie screen on which the aging actress, thanks to the magic of the camera and make-up man, appears young and radiant, purged of her wrinkles; he was the radio over which one hears a symphony without seeing the sweat of the first violinist.
And yet, like all canned entertainment, Francis Cleary produced, in the end, a melancholy effect. To listen to him too long was like going to the movies in the morning; it engendered a sense of alienation and distance. Eventually, the host would move away, his desire to see Caldwell killed, not quickened, by this ghostly reunion, as the appetite is killed by a snack before dinner, as the taste for van Gogh’s paintings was killed by the reproductions of the “Sunflowers” and “L’Arlésienne” that used to symbolize cultural sympathies in the living rooms of Francis Cleary’s friends. But as the lesson of “L’Arlésienne” prevented hardly anyone from making the same mistake with Picasso’s “Lady in White,” so the lesson of Hugh Caldwell never prevented the host from allowing Francis Cleary to substitute on some other occasion for another old friend who was distasteful to the hostess, and many parties would be composed exclusively of Francis Clearys, male and female, stand-ins, reasonable facsimiles, who could fraternize with each other under the Redon or the Rouault or the Renoir reproductions—ready with anecdote, quotation, and paraphrase, amiable and immune as seconds at a duel. Afterwards, the host and hostess, reviewing the situation, would be unable to decide why it was that though everybody stayed late, got drunk, and ate all the sandwiches, nobody had had a particularly good time. And the failure of the party, far from causing bitterness or recrimination, would actually draw them together. Murmuring criticisms of their guests, they would pull up the blankets and embrace, convinced that they preferred each other, or rather that they preferred themselves as a couple to anybody else they knew.
But what about Francis Cleary riding home in a taxi with his female equivalent? Sex was not for him; his given name disclosed this—it could be either masculine or feminine; nobody ever called him Frank. He might be a bachelor or a spinster; quite often, he was a couple, but a couple which functioned as an integer. If he had begun his Francis Cleary existence as a single man, it was unwise for him to marry, for a wife might define him too sharply, people might like her and then other people would dislike her; before he knew it, through her, he might become the issue rather than the solution of a dispute. To say that sex was not for him does not mean that he did not sometimes have girls, or, in his female aspect, men; he might even have been in love, but since nearly the whole area of his life was public and social, this one small reserved section which he kept for himself was private, intensely so. His romantic activities, if he had any, were extracurricular. They did not interfere with his social function, and it is impossible to tell which was cause and which effect: was it the fact that he had very early in life fallen in love with the married lady that placed his weekends and his evenings and his vacations at the disposal of his friends, or had he recognized from the very beginning that he was cast for the part of the professional friend and arranged his affairs accordingly, cultivating without real predilection sexual tastes so impossible that they must be forever gratified sub rosa, under assumed names, in Pullman cars, alleys, cheap hotel rooms, public parks? How was anybody to know? In some of his manifestations, it seemed quite plain that design was at the bottom of it, that love had been gladly foregone for the sound of the telephone bell. He would hint at a disastrous passion or a vice to each of his married friends when the intimacy reached a certain stage, like a stranger on a train who after a given amount of conversation produces a calling card, but these confessions had a faint air of fraudulence or at least of frivolity: how could anyone take very seriously a passion or a morbid inclination which left its victim free every day from five until midnight and all day Sundays and holidays? Nevertheless, his confessions were accepted, often with a kind of gratitude. They served to “explain” him to new acquaintances, who might have thought him peculiar if they had not been assured that he kept a truly horrible vice in his closet.
In other cases, there appeared to have been no calculation. He thought sporadically of marriage but kept looking for “the right person,” who was assumed to exist somewhere just beyond the social horizon, like a soul waiting to be born. Yet whenever a living being materialized who wore the features of the right person, she was found to be already married or indifferent or tied to an aged mother or in some other way impossible. So the vigil continued, until time made it an absurdity, and at fifty Francis Cleary ceased to yearn, ascribed his fate to a geographical accident (everybody has his double and everybody has his complement, but not necessarily in New York or even in America), to an over-romantic temperament, or simply to the bad habit, contracted in adolescence and never overcome, of falling in love with married women, which made him regard every woman who lacked a husband as essentially incomplete. Putting love behind him, Francis Cleary would throw himself more actively than ever into the occupation of friendship, the life of visits, small gifts and favors exchanged, mild gossip, concern over illnesses, outings for the children, and would, quite often, experience a kind of late blooming which would inspire all his friends to hope that he was at last on the verge of marriage, while in reality it was the abandonment of the idea of marriage that had permitted his nature, finally, to express itself. In this aspect—the aspect of innocence—Francis Cleary was almost lovable. Certainly he commanded the affection if not the active preference of his friends, and those husbands and wives who had accepted him as the lesser evil grew to like him for himself. It is significant, nevertheless, that he was liked for goodness of heart, which does not provoke envy, rather than for talent, charm, or beauty, which do. And goodness of heart notwithstanding, it was still a chore to dine or take a walk with him alone, and if by chance in these tête-à-têtes a muted happiness was achieved, his companion could never quite get over it, referred to the occasion repeatedly in conversation (“You know, I had quite a good time with Francis Cleary the other day”), as though a miracle had been witnessed and virtue been its own reward.
Yet here perhaps there has been a confusion of identity. It is likely that the Francis Cleary we have just been speaking of, the good, bewildered, yearning Francis Cleary, was never the true Francis Cleary at all, but an uncle for whom the real one, the modern one, was named. Whenever they met the good Francis Cleary, his friends were struck by a certain anachronism in his character; they would say that he reminded them of their childhood, of a maiden aunt who did the mending, or a bachelor great-uncle who gave them a gold piece every Christmas morning and left his watch to them in his will when he died. The true Francis Cleary had no such overtones. He was as much a product of the age as nylon or plywood, and he could be distinguished from the others, those uncles and aunts of his who lingered on in a later period, by the fact that one did not pity him. One could not mourn for Francis, because he did not mourn for himself. He cast no shadow behind him of thwarted ambition, unconsummated desire, lost ideals. Indeed, one had only to set the word frustration beside him to see that the very conception of frustration was outmoded, hopelessly provincial—perhaps in the Middle West, in small towns, men still walked the streets restlessly at night, questioning their fate, wondering how it might have been otherwise, but in any advanced center of civilization, people, like sheets, came pre-shrunk; life held neither surprises nor disappointments for them.
And your true Francis Cleary was the perfect sanforized man, the ideal which others only approximated. He appeared to have no demands whatsoever—that was the beauty of him. Or rather, as in a correctly balanced equation, demands and possible satisfactions canceled out, so that the man himself, i.e., the problem, vanished. When an apartment door shut behind him, it was as if he had never been. Nobody discussed him in his absence, or if they did, it was only as a concession to convention. Once or twice a year, he had a small, official illness, and in his comfortable hotel apartment received flowers, books, and wine-flavored calf’s-foot jelly from his friends. Like everything else about him, these illnesses had a symbolic character: they permitted his friends to bestow on him tokens of a concern they did not feel. Without these illnesses, his friends might have grown to think themselves monsters of insensibility—was it, after all, natural to have a close friend whom you never gave a thought to? Francis, farseeing, provident, took care that such questions should not arise. He could no more afford to be a thorn in the conscience, the subject of an inward argument, than to be the occasion of verbal debate. The true friend might languish in furnished rooms with pneumonia and only the girl across the hall to help, or fight delirium tremens in Bellevue, but Francis’ sore throats were always well attended. In the same way, he would from time to time present his friends with some innocuous little problem (should he go to Maine or New Hampshire during his vacation?) with the air of a man who asks for help in the most serious crisis of his life. His friends would loyally come through with advice and travel booklets, reminiscences of childhood summers, letters of introduction, and feel, when Francis set off at last to the place where he had intended to go originally, that they had stood by him through thick and thin, that the demands of friendship had been handsomely satisfied.
Once in a great while, when a friendship showed unmistakable signs of limpness (when a husband and wife seemed to be falling in love with each other again, or had reached the point of estrangement where each saw his own friends, or began to cultivate the acquaintance of another Francis Cleary, a competitor), Francis would go so far as to borrow money from the husband. These loans were of course mere temporary accommodations, and the warm glow of generosity felt by the husband almost always served to restore the circulation of the friendship. Still, during the short time he had the money (he usually waited until the twenty-seventh to borrow and then paid it back promptly the first of the next month), Francis was always very nervous. Once or twice he thought he had seen fear in the husband’s eyes, fear that financial need would turn “that nice Francis Cleary,” as the wives often called him, into another “poor old Frank.” Was it possible, he believed the husband was asking himself, that he could have been deceived? Had importunity, cleverly disguised, always lurked in this old, old acquaintance, and had it waited this long to strike? The classic phrase of male disillusionment, “I thought you were different,” trembled visibly on his lips, and Francis saw himself slipping. The moment, of course, passed. Francis repaid the money, and the husband, metaphorically wiping the sweat from his brow, wondered how he could have doubted him. Certainly Francis was different, had always been so. The friends who had been with him at school or at college, and who could remember him at all, were absolutely at one on this point.
Even there, at the very beginning, importunity had been excluded from his nature. The desire to excel, to shine, to be closest, best friend, most liked, best dressed, funniest, had played no part with him. He had been content simply to be there, to be along, the unnoticed eye-witness. Wherever he had gone to school, whether it was Exeter or P. S. 12, whether Yale or Iowa or Carnegie Tech, the Chicago Art Institute or Harvard Business, he was the man that nobody could think of a quotation for when the yearbook was being compiled; and if you opened the yearbook today you would find the editors’ defeat commemorated by a blank below his photograph. Yet he had not been disliked, for there had been in him none of the burning hunger, the watchfulness, the covert shame (however carefully masked by studiousness, indifference to society, eccentricity, geological field trips, bird walks) that brand the true outsider for the vengeance of those inside. During the rushing period he had been neither too anxious nor too self-assured nor too indifferent, with the result that, in many cases, he was pledged to a slightly better fraternity than he might have expected to make; and in the cases where he was overlooked in the general excitement, the omission was always remedied—he was quietly taken in later on, in the junior year instead of the sophomore. And the welcome given him, whether tardy or prompt, never failed to create a small commotion among the outsiders, who knew themselves, correctly, to be more brilliant, better looking, richer, better scholars, better athletes, better drinkers, or whatever was considered valuable, than he. Inevitably, they construed the pledging of Francis Cleary as a calculated affront to themselves. Then and thereafter, forever and ever, the choice of Francis Cleary was not an affirmation of something, but a negation of something else.
Thus, in the family we were talking about, if Francis Cleary was for the husband a substitute for Hugh Caldwell, for the wife he was the flat denial of Hugh Caldwell. Mr. Caldwell, sitting in his lumpy armchair in the Village, might have been solacing himself for the fact that he was not invited to the Leightons with the idea that the wife was simply a bitch who would not let her husband see his rowdy old friends. But when Francis Cleary, another of John Leighton’s friends of the same vintage, dropped in to see him, fresh from a cocktail party at the Leightons’, Mr. Caldwell could no longer mistake her meaning. It was he personally who was being excluded, and if he stared at Francis Cleary and asked himself, “What in the name of God has this guy got that I haven’t?” this was precisely the question Mrs. Leighton intended to leave with him.
At this point the reader may ask what possible motive Mrs. Leighton could have had. What drove her to persecute a man whom she hardly knew, who could not, even if he had wished it, have done her the slightest injury? The reply can best be put in the form of a further question. Let anyone to whom Mrs. Leighton’s behavior seems inexplicable, or at any rate odd, ask himself why he does not like his wife’s friends. Is it really—as he is always telling himself—that they are unattractive or that they bring out the worst in her, encourage her to spend too much money or to think about love affairs, or that they talk continually of things and people of whom he is ignorant, or that they borrow from her or take up too much of her time? Is it even, to be franker, that he is jealous of them? This explanation too is insufficient, for we can look around us and find husbands who will not allow their wives’ friends or relations in the house but who display an amazing cordiality toward their wives’ lovers, and we can find husbands who positively reject their wives’ affection, who treat it as a bore and a nuisance, who yet will use every means to deprive their wives of what, from any sensible point of view, ought to be an outlet, a diversionary channel for that affection—the society of friends. Is not envious, rather, the word? Will the dubious reader acknowledge that his wife and her friends possess in common some quality that is absent from his own nature? It is this quality that attracted him to her in the first place, though by now he has probably succeeded in obliterating all traces of it from her character, just as the wife who marries the young poet because he is so different from all the other men she knows will soon succeed in getting him to go into the advertising business, or at the very least set up such a neurosis in him that he can only write one poem a year. What passes for love in our competitive society is frequently envy: the phlegmatic husband who marries a vivacious wife is in the same position as the businessman who buys up the stock of a rival corporation in order to kill it. The businessman may at the beginning delude himself with the idea that the rival company has certain patents which he very much wants to exploit, but it will shortly appear that these patents, once so heartily desired, are in competition with his own processes—they will have to be scrapped. We cannot, in the end, possess anything that is not ourselves. That vivacity, money, respectability, talent which we hoped to add to ourselves by marriage are, we discover to our surprise, unassimilable to our very natures. There is nothing we can do with them but destroy them, deaden the vivacity, spend the money, tarnish the respectability, maim the talent; and when we have finished this work of destruction we may even get angry—the wife of the poet may upbraid him because he no longer writes poems, or the dull husband of the gay girl may reproach her for her woodenness in company.
Yet now a distinction must be made. In some cases, it is our wife or our husband who is the direct object of our envy and our desire, and in these marriages the friends are mere accidental victims; we have nothing against them personally; if we hate them it is because we have seen them smiling with our wife. But there is another kind of marriage, where it is the partner who is the accidental victim: simply a hostage whom we have carried home from a raid on the enemy, that is, on the circle of the friends. We bear this person no actual ill-will; we may even pity him as we lop off an ear or a little finger in some nicety of reprisal. He himself is not the object of revenge, he is merely the symbol of our hostility, usually for some group, class, caste, sex, or race. Such cases are generally marked by a crude and striking disparity between the husband and the wife; observe the communist married to the banker’s daughter, the anti-Semite who marries the beautiful Jewess, the businessman who marries an actress and makes her quit the stage. These marriages are exercises in metonymy: the part is taken for the whole, the symbol for the thing symbolized. One might think, in the case of the businessman and the actress, that he had taken leave of his senses—why marry an actress if not to sit in the front row at her first nights?—if one did not know that his college life had been poisoned by his failure to make the Thespian Society, and that his secret vendetta against the stage had already expressed itself in certain Times Square real estate operations, in investments in radio and movie companies, and, once, in an anonymous note addressed to the Commissioner of Licenses pointing out an indelicate passage in a current Broadway hit. The communist who subjects the banker’s daughter to the petty squalor of life on Thirteenth Street—the unmade studio couch, the tin of evaporated milk flanking the rank brass ash tray on the breakfast table, the piles of dusty pamphlets, the late meetings, the cheap whiskey without soda, the hair done over the wash-basin with wave-set bought from a cut-rate druggist—this man may be actually repelled by the conditions in which he obliges her to live; but his home is a stage kept set for the call her horrified father will pay them. And the anti-Semite who marries a beautiful Jewess may imagine that he has been carried away by love, treat her with great kindness, and exempt her from the Jewish race by a kind of personal fiat, declaring over and over again to himself and possibly to her that he married her in spite of her relations, her mother, her sister, her hook-nosed uncles, while in reality he is bored with his wife (who actually does not seem very Jewish), and it is the yearly visit of his mother-in-law to which he looks forward with sadistic zest. Summer after summer, he may promise his wife that he will not use the word “kike” in the old lady’s hearing again, but somehow it always slides out, the old lady goes upstairs in tears, and the marriage has once again been consummated.
This distinction must be noted for the sake of clarity, though to the friends and to the wives and the husbands it makes really very little difference whether they are disliked for themselves or for some more irrelevant reason. The child struck by a bomb is indifferent to the private motives of the bombardier. Thus, with the Leighton couple, to return to our original question, Mrs. Leighton may have detested Hugh Caldwell because he or someone like him had once run a crayon through her sketch at a night class at the Art Students League or because she was a stylist at Macy’s and he a practicing nudist, or for any other reason that sprang from a divergence of interests. Or she may have found only one thing to disparage in Mr. Caldwell—his feeling of friendship for her husband. In either case, the result would be the same; whether from inclination or merely to spite her husband, Mrs. Leighton would see to it that Mr. Caldwell was not at home in her nice new house.
There are people who, whatever their good intentions, cannot renounce love, and there are people, a larger number, who cannot renounce victory. Thus, to take the second category first, a woman like Mrs. Leighton is not playing the game when she pretends to have sacrificed something by having only Francis Clearys at her parties; the jealousy and anger of the excluded Hugh Caldwell more than repay her for any superficial boredom she may have experienced during the evening. A still worse cheat is the anti-Semite who asks a Jewish Francis Cleary, a second cousin of his wife’s, time after time to his house so that he may later express the most cruel and hair-raising opinions without being accused of bias. Most monstrous of all was the businessman already alluded to who married the actress and whose hatred of theatrical people stopped short of a young Francis Cleary, a radio actor with whom the wife had once played a season of summer stock. This man, whose name was Al, enacted for several months a pseudo-friendship with Francis. He invited him to lunch downtown, introduced him to radio magnates, listened to his morning broadcasts; the wife, the former actress, was at first bewildered and touched by these attentions, which she conceived to be overtures of love, and she began to look forward to the time when the house would be filled with her real friends, the playwrights, directors, and legitimate actors whom she missed so much in the country. It was not until her husband began to talk continually of the superiority of the verse drama of the air to the box-like drama of the stage that she perceived the malignancy of his design. Her answer was direct and militant. She treated Francis exactly as if he had been a genuine enthusiasm of her husband’s—one night, without the slightest provocation, she turned him out of the house.
This shocking experience was crucial for the young actor Francis Cleary. It confirmed in him the sense, not yet quite solidified, of the perils of his position. For nearly two hours, as he paced the station platform, waiting for the train that would take him away from Fairfield County, away from important men who professed to admire Norman Corwin and were going to take him to lunch with the president of the Red Network, for this long-short intolerable time, he felt himself identified with the lot of humanity, with the mothers-in-law, sisters, true friends, ex-lovers for whom life is a series of indignities, with all those who, having attached themselves, are in a position to be dislodged. His heart cried out against the false husband who had not raised a hand to save him; it cried out and at length he hardened it. From this time on, Francis took the most energetic measures lest the taint of affection poison one of his friendships, and his reluctance to be identified with either partner to a marriage passed as devotion to the family, especially in doubtful cases like the Leightons’, where to avoid the slightest appearance of partisanship, he concentrated his attention on the children and was always playing games with them on the floor or taking them out to the zoo or to holiday marionette shows—to the point that many of his friends kept remarking to each other that it was such a pity that Francis had never married because he was obviously mad about children. And though many of the children did not at all care for Francis and would even prefer sitting at a bar while their father drank with some dubious confederate to the most delightful outing Francis could offer them, others, more successfully educated by their parents, would take the name for the thing and being told that Francis adored them would docilely adore him back, to the limit, at any rate, of their capacities. But in either case, the mother, watching her child set out hand in hand with Francis to some accepted childish objective, was spared the slightest misgiving lest the child positively enjoy himself with Francis. Her own feelings about Francis assured her that there was no danger whatever that the child would get anything better than what he was used to at home.
In most instances, these precautionary measures were sufficient to keep Francis his status as friend. He watched, with professional amusement, the struggles of his younger counterparts to extricate themselves from the depths of a closer relation. He himself could never again be fooled when a husband or a wife, out of sheer malignance, would pretend to like him, seek out his company, complain that he was not asked to dinner often enough, lunch with him frequently alone, strike up a correspondence with him, till the other member of the couple would go nearly mad with exasperation and feelings of injustice, asking himself (if it were the husband) a hundred times a day how Dorothea could tolerate that lumpish little bore when she had a tantrum in the bedroom every time one of his real friends, one of his interesting friends, set a foot in the apartment. Francis could foretell, almost to the hour, the date of the inevitable rupture, and if it had not been for professional competition he might have warned his young namesake not to go to the Leightons on the night that John Leighton, for absolutely no reason, would break a highball glass over his head. He himself practiced such discretion in these matters that he occasionally resorted to flight when there was no real necessity for it. The smallest compliment paid him by a husband or a wife would make him suspect a danger, and he would scurry away to safety before the friendship had got half started, while the couple, who had been counting on him to replace the people they liked in their social life and had no morbid designs at all, would ask themselves what they could have done to offend that nice Mr. Cleary.
The night on the station platform had left him with its mark. Where formerly the desire to be loved, noticed, esteemed, had, if it ever feebly stirred in him, been repressed without a pang, now the fear of being loved became a positive obsession with him. He saw annihilation stare at him in any half-affectionate glance. Though his whole activity was given over to the manipulation of the symbols of devotion—presents, visits, solicitous inquiries, games, walks in the country—still the validation of a single one of these tokens would suffice to ruin him, just as, it is presumed, the introduction of a single five-dollar gold piece into the channels of our currency would upset our entire monetary system. The liking of a single human being would translate him into the realm of measures and values, the realm of comparisons. Someone had valued him, and the whole question of his value was opened. From being a zero, the dead point at which reckoning begins, he became a real number, if only the tiniest fraction, and thus entered the field of competition. Or to put it another way, he passed from being an x, an unknown and inestimable quantity which could be substituted for a known quantity (Hugh Caldwell) in any social equation, to being a known quantity himself, that is he passed from algebra into arithmetic. He no longer represented Hugh Caldwell, but existing now on the same plane was capable of being compared with him. However, his whole merit had consisted of the fact that nobody could possibly like him as much as Hugh Caldwell could be liked; and indeed if anybody liked him one-half, one-quarter, one-tenth as much, it was enough to finish him as the family friend.
A husband, hearing his wife’s voice quicken as she answered Francis Cleary’s telephone call, would be startled into asking himself the impermissible question: Why do we see that fellow? The light fervor of his wife’s tone jarred on his sense of what was fitting; it breached some unspoken agreement—she was not playing fair. He felt as if he had been duped. From that moment on, he disliked Francis Cleary intensely, and his wife would have to fight to get him invited to a party, just as if he had been one of her own friends. If she were loyal in her attachments, she would soon find herself trying to see him when her husband was out of town or working late at the office; she would meet him between engagements in the bars of quiet hotels. But this illicit atmosphere was deeply uncongenial to Francis. Her affection, her fidelity, could not begin to make up to him for the fact that he was no longer asked to her house. Indeed he hated her for that affection, which, as he saw it, was responsible for all the trouble. Like the husband, he experienced a sense of outrage; he too had been betrayed by her. With her inordinate capacity for friendship, she had gulled them both. She, on her side, became aware that Francis was suffering from his exclusion. She imagined (this particular wife was rather stupid) that he missed his old friend, her husband; and to save Francis pain she began to lie. “Jerry misses you terribly,” she would tell him, “but we see hardly anybody any more. Jerry hasn’t been feeling well. We stay home and read detective stories. . . .” Francis, of course, knew better, and eventually it would happen that he met them when they were dining out with a large party of friends, and the poor wife’s duplicity would be exposed. All her nudges and desperate, appealing glances went unanswered—Jerry would not invite Francis to sit down at their table. After that, Francis was always too busy to see her when she called. If anybody mentioned her name, he spoke of her with a rancor that was for him unusual, so that people assumed either that she had come between Francis and his old friend, her husband, or that she had tried to have an affair with Francis and failed. Of the husband he continued to speak in the highest terms, thus reinforcing both of these theories. And his admiration was not simulated. He respected Jerry for the contempt in which Jerry held him—it was an attitude they shared. As for the unfortunate wife, she could never make out what had gone wrong. In the end, she came to believe her husband when he told her, as he frequently did, that she had no talent for human relations.
Between the Scylla of an Al and the Charybdis of a Jerry’s wife, Francis steers his uneasy course. Perhaps it is the vicissitudes of this life, the vigilance against the true and imaginary dangers, that are responsible for the change in Francis. Certainly it has been hard for him to be obliged, every year or so, to re-examine his premises. Francis had, it seemed to him, made a good bargain with the world. Yet whenever a Jerry’s wife took a fancy to him, he questioned his own shrewdness. If she likes me, he would ask himself, why wouldn’t others, and if likes, why not loves, and does she really and how much? It would be weeks, after such an experience, before Francis could silence these questions. Like a businessman, he feared that he had closed his deal with life too soon; the buyer might have paid much more. And as the businessman can only set his mind at rest by assuring himself that the property he disposed of was really good riddance of a negligible asset, so Francis’ one recourse was to persuade himself once again that he had been perfectly correct in setting the zero, dejected yet triumphant, opposite his own name. But however successful as auditing, these midnight reckonings must have been painful, even to Francis; one night his anesthetized spirit must have awakened in rage and spite.
Or perhaps nature does abhor a vacuum; perhaps the wall of the sealed, sterile chamber that was Francis’ nature collapsed from atmospheric pressure, and in rushed all the unattached emotions—that is, hatred, envy, fear, which, unlike love, do not cling to a definite object—that float, gaseous, over man’s sphere. At any rate, Francis has been changing. Under our very eyes, he has been turning into everything that he, by definition, was not. If you have failed to notice the steps in this process, it is because you are so much in the habit of not thinking about Francis that he could transform himself into a snake on your parlor floor without attracting your attention. Your indifference has been a cloak of invisibility behind which he has been preparing for you some rather startling surprises. But now that your memory has been jogged on the point, you will recall that his manners, while never highly polished, were once more acceptable than they are today. There was a time, for example, when he left your cocktail parties promptly at seven-thirty, taking with him one of the more burdensome women guests for a table-d’hôte dinner in the Village. But in the course of years his leavetakings have been steadily retarded; soon your wife has been cooking scrambled eggs for him at nine o’clock; and now you are lucky if at midnight or two or three you do not have to make up a bed for him in the spare room or, at the very best, take him home in a taxi and open his door for him. Once it was the interesting guests who stayed, disputing, quoting poetry, playing the piano, singing; today the fascinating people have always somewhere else to go, and every party boils down to Francis Cleary; you do not question this, possibly, but accept it as an analogy to life.
Perhaps it is Francis’ growing addiction to drink (he no longer waits for you to notice his empty glass but helps himself from the shaker or inquires boldly, “Did someone say something about another drink?”) that keeps him late and is also responsible for the mounting truculence of his conversation. In the old days Francis was always prompt to shut off one of his anecdotes when his companion’s interest slightly wavered away from him; indeed, much of his conversation seemed to be constructed around the interruption he awaited. Gradually, however, he has become more adhesive to his topics. He may be interrupted by the arrival of a newcomer, the host may excuse himself to fetch somebody’s coat, or the hostess may go in to look at the baby—but Francis has put a bookmark in his story. “As I was saying,” he resumes, when the distraction has passed. Furthermore, his opinions, which he used to modulate to suit the conversation, never taking up a position without preparing a retreat from it, have now become rigid and obtrusive. This is particularly true of him in his female aspect. Frances Cleary, once the indistinct listener, now arrives at a party with a single idea that haunts the conversation like a ghost. This idea is almost always regressive in character, the shade of a once-live controversy (abstract vs. representational art, progressive vs. classical education), but the female Frances treats it as though she personally were its relict; any change of subject she regards as irreverence to the dead. “Others may forget but I remember,” her aggrieved expression declares. If the hostess is successful in deflecting her to some more personal topic, a single word overheard from across the room will be enough to send her train of ideas puffing out of the station once more. She has dedicated herself, say, to the defense of Raphael against the menace of Mondrian; momentarily silenced, she will instantly revive should one of the other guests be so careless as to remark, “She’s as pretty as a picture.” “You can talk about pictures all you want,” Frances will begin. . . .
In the male Francis Cleary this belligerency is more likely to take a physical form. More and more often nowadays, Francis breaks glasses, ash trays, lamps. His elbow catches the maid’s arm as she is serving the gravy, and the hostess’s dress must go to the cleaners. All during an evening, he may have been his old undemanding self, but suddenly, at midnight, a sullenness will fall on him. “Oh, for Christ’s sake,” he will ejaculate when the talk goes over his head. Or he may grab someone else’s hat and stumble savagely out, knocking over a table on his way.
As a couple, he does not drink too much. On the contrary, he quietly but firmly refuses the third and even the second drink. He arrives early, the two of him, and ensconces himself on the sofa (the Clearys of all numbers and genders have an affinity for the sofa, which they occupy as a symbol of possession). From this point of vantage, he, or shall we say for convenience’ sake, they, overlook the proceedings with a kind of regal lumpishness. Though their position as friends of the family may be new and still insecure, they treat the very oldest and dearest members of the wife’s or the husband’s circle (the college roommate, the former lover) as candidates for their approval. They do not consider it necessary to talk in the ordinary way, but put sharp, inquisitorial questions to the people that are brought up to them (“Would you mind telling me the significance of that yellow necktie?” “Why do the characters in your novels have such a depressing sex life?”), or else they merely sit, demanding to be entertained.
Like the drinking Francis Cleary, they stay until the last guest has gone, and present a report of their findings to the host and hostess. Nothing has escaped them; they have noticed your former roommate’s stammer and your lover’s squint; they have counted the highballs of the heavy drinker and recorded the tremor of his hand; the woman you thought beautiful is, it turns out, bowlegged, and the lively Russian should have washed his hair. And they present these findings with absolute objectivity; they do not judge but merely report. Though each human being is, so to speak, a work of art, the Clearys are scientists, and take pride in disobeying the artist’s commands. If the artist places a highlight at what he considers a central point of his personality, a highlight that says, “Look here,” the Clearys instantly look elsewhere: the expressiveness of a man’s eyes will never blind them to the weakness of his chin. And you and your wife, who have hitherto obeyed the laws of art and humanity and looked where you were told to look, are now utterly confounded by this clear, bleak view. Your friends whom you regarded as wholes are now assemblages of slightly damaged parts. You are plunged into despair, but you do not question the Clearys’ right to conduct this survey, for their observations are given a peculiar authority and force by the fact that they refer to the other guests—whom they have just met—by their first names. “John drinks terribly, doesn’t he?” they say, and it is useless for you to pretend that this particular evening was exceptional for your friend—that “John” asserts a familiarity with his habits that is greater, if anything, than your own. By the time they have finished their last glass (“Just a little cool water from the tap, please”) and you have seen them to the door you and your wife are utterly drained of energy and belief. There is not even a quarrel left between you, for they have exposed your friends and hers with perfect impartiality. Your world has been depopulated. You have only each other and the Clearys.
Your sole escape from this intolerable situation is for one of you to blame the Clearys on the other. You can divide them up between you. If the husband, say, can be held responsible for Mr. and Mrs. Cleary (“You were the one who insisted on having them”), the wife can take Francis as her charge. You can treat them, that is, as friends, and this will immediately result in the exclusion of both factions. But now a super Francis Cleary must be found, a zero raised to a higher power, a negation of a negation. The search may be long, you may wander down false trails, but finally one night at a cocktail party you will find him, the ineffable blank, and you and your wife will seize him and drag him home with you to eat sandwiches and talk excitedly like lovers, of why you have never met before. Your difficulties are over, your wife smiles at you again, and when the two of you stand in the doorway to see him off, your arm falls affectionately across her shoulder.
But alas the same process is about to begin again, and the stakes have been raised. Your new nonentity is larger and emptier than your original little friend; naturally, he commands a higher price. Dozens of other couples are competing with you for this superb creation; he does not hold himself cheap. You realize very quickly from the envious glances your colleagues and neighbors cast toward him whenever you display him at a public gathering that if you want to hold on to him you will have to pay through the nose. Gone are the potted plants, the Christmas cheeses, the toys for the children that were regularly issued by the old Francis Cleary. The super friend gives nothing; he does not even try to make himself agreeable; he will not talk to old ladies or help with the dishes or go to the store for a loaf of bread. His company is all you will ever get of him, and the demands he makes on you will grow steadily more extortionate. If you want him around, his demeanor will tell you, you will have to give up your former friends, your work, your interests, your principles—the whole complex of idiosyncrasies that make up your nature—and your only reward for this terrible sacrifice is that your wife will have to make it too. Soon he will be bringing his own friends to your house, and these friends will be the other couples with whom you share him (did you imagine that he could confine himself to you?). Already he borrows your money, your books, and your whiskey.
He will stop at nothing, for he has always hated you and now he knows that he has got you where he wants you—you cannot live without him. Watching this monster as he sits at his ease on your sofa, your wife may look back with feelings of actual affection on your queer old friend, Hugh Caldwell; but now it is too late. Hugh Caldwell spits at the mention of your wife’s name, and, quite possibly, at the mention of your own; and, anyway, you ask yourself, are you really sure that you want to see Hugh Caldwell again, especially if it would mean that your wife, in return, could see one of her old friends? No, you say to yourself, we cannot have that; there must be some compromise, some middle way—it is not necessary to go so far. Your mind beats on the door of the dilemma. Surely somewhere, you exclaim silently, somewhere in this great city, living quietly, perhaps, in a furnished room, there is a friend whom neither of us would have to feel so strongly about. . . . Some plain man or woman, some dowdy little couple of regular habits and indefinite tastes, some person utterly unobjectionable, unobtrusive, undefined. . . . With loving strokes, you complete the portrait of this ideal, and all the while there he sits, grinning at you, the lesser evil, but you do not recognize him.
After all, you say to yourself, my requirements are modest; I will give up anything for a little peace and quiet. You forget that it was in the name of peace and quiet that this despot was welcomed—just as the Jewish banker in the concentration camp forgets the donation he made to the Nazi party fund, back in 1931, when his great fear was communism; just as Benedetto Croce, anti-fascist philosopher, forgot in Naples the days when he supported Mussolini in the Senate at Rome, because order was certainly preferable to anarchy and bolshevism was the real menace. You cannot believe, you will not ever believe, that your desire for peace and quiet, i.e., for the permanent stalemate, has logically resulted in the noisy oppressor on the sofa. On the contrary, his presence there seems to you a cruel and unaccountable accident.
You are not happy with your wife but you do not want change. In a more romantic period you might have dreamed of voluptuous blondes, fast women and low haunts; you might even have run off with the lady organist or the wife of the Methodist minister. But you are a man of peace and careful respectability. You do not ask adventure or the larger life. Though at one time, theoretically, you may have desired these things, you have perceived that adventure for one can readily be the excuse for adventure for all, and who knows but what your wife’s or your neighbor’s capacity for adventure might be greater than your own? If all men were created equal, programs for achieving equality would not exist. The industrialist would welcome the people’s army into the gates of the factory, if he could be sure that nobody would be any better off than he. We do not want more than anyone else, though we may take more for fear of getting less. What we desire is absolute parity, and this can only be achieved by calculating in a downward direction, with zero as the ultimate, unattainable ideal. Our lives become a series of disarmament conferences: I will reduce my demands if you will reduce yours. With parity as our aim, it is impossible to calculate in an upward direction, for a nation will be allowed a navy which it has not the productive capacity to build, or a man may be granted freedoms which he has not the faculties to exercise, and gross inequalities will immediately result.
So long as you and I cannot accept the doctrine “From each according to his capacities, to each according to his needs,” the totalitarian state will supply the answer to the difficulties of democracy and Francis Cleary will be the ideal friend. At this very moment, you are planning to overthrow the incumbent Cleary, who happens to be staying with you for the weekend. In a loud voice he has demanded something to eat, though he finished lunch only an hour ago. Your wife has rushed out to the kitchen to make him a chicken sandwich, and you sit watching him in uneasy silence. You are afraid to play the phonograph because he does not like music; you are afraid to initiate a topic of conversation because he resents any mention of persons he has not met or things he does not understand; you are afraid to pick up a newspaper lest he take it as a slight—and if you cross him he will pinch the baby.
The fires of resistance are lit in your heart as the sandwich comes in and he opens it with a blunt critical finger and asks for pickles and mayonnaise. Your pulse quickens in little throbs of solidarity with your unfortunate wife. You will make, you say to yourself, common cause with her and eject the tyrant. If she will do it for you, so much the better; but there can be no question whatever about the heartiness of your support. The danger is, of course, that in the warm fraternity of the revolt, the coziness of plans and preparations, the intimacy of secret meetings in lonely houses at night, with a reliable farmer standing guard (Qui passe?), certain illusions of your wife’s may be revived. The whole question of friends may be opened again; a period of anarchy may even follow in which all the ghosts of both camps will meet once more in your living room and debate the old issues; tempers will rise and you will have to fling out of the house late at night and look for a room in a hotel. In the interests of peace, you say to yourself, would it not be wiser to select in advance some common friend and avoid the interregnum? Somewhere, only recently did you not meet a couple . . . ? In vain, you try to recall their faces and their name. Memory is obstinate but you do not despair. The very dimness of your impression convinces you that you are on the right track. They are the ones. If you meet them again, you will know them at once and rush forward to meet them with a glad cry of recognition. There is only one difficulty. Supposing they are already engaged . . . ?
Your only way out of this recurrent nightmare (not counting the humane one, which is hardly worth mentioning) is for you and your wife to take the logical next step, to become the Clearys, say, of Round Hill Road. Why should you shrink from it? What have you to lose? In what do you differ from the man on the sofa?