THREE

HE BUSTLED INTO OUR office, shorty stout, middle-aged, breathy—born May 8, 1895; we others were in our twenties—with popping reddish-brown eyes and fresh pink skin, which looked as though he had just bathed. Perhaps it was this suggestion of baths—the tepidarium—and his fine straight nose that gave him a Roman air. I think he was wearing a gray two-piece suit and a white shirt.

We walked to the Union Square restaurant and took a table on the second floor, above the cafeteria. I was the only woman, but Wilson did not seem to notice me specially. He talked mainly to Dwight and Fred. Somebody asked for our drink order. We were all, except for Dwight perhaps, nervous and tongue-tied, and a drink would have helped. But Wilson shook his head irritably, as though annoyed by the proposal, and we all meekly followed suit. Probably he didn’t drink and disapproved of the habit. Maybe one of the boys had the courage to order a beer.

That is all I recall of this first meeting. Of course I remembered him from Vassar in my junior year—the year after Axel’s Castle—when he had read a paper on Flaubert with such alarming pauses that Miss Sandison, who had introduced him, had run down to the basement in Avery to find him a glass of water: “Vox exhaurit in faucibus,” she said later. Now he showed more aplomb as we talked about the new, anti-Stalinist PR and what we were going to have in our first issues. He agreed that we ought to have something by Trotsky, if we could get it. He may have tried to interest us in his friend Paul Rosenfeld, to be our music critic. We spoke of André Gide and his revised view of the USSR, exemplified in the piece I was translating for our second number. Wilson had read it in French, he said, cutting the subject off. As I later learned, he did not think much of Gide. The conversation turned to Travels in Two Democracies, which had described his own trip to Russia, contemporaneous with Gide’s. The title showed how far he had come politically in a little more than a year; that book had been published in 1936. He could no longer call Russia a democracy unless ironically—the trials had happened in between. Essentially his book belonged to the epoch of the Kirov assassination, and perhaps he was slightly embarrassed by his failure to see ahead.

Over lunch, his voice was light and pleasant; this was not one of his booming days. He was always at his best when he was bookish. By the time we separated, he had promised us a piece for our first number.

The following week Margaret Marshall called me at Covici. She had heard from Wilson, who wanted to take us out to dinner, the two of us. She supposed it was because of the Nation series, in which he had been singled out for praise. If so, it seemed odd that he had waited two years, I thought. Peggy, who had met him, was being coy about why he was asking us both, when he “kind of” liked her, she was sure. Perhaps he wanted chaperonage, I suggested lightly. For my part, I could not guess what was in his mind. The whole thing seemed very strange. But if Wilson was “after” one of us, it must be me, I reasoned, since he had just met me in the PR office. Fred and the boys puzzled over the invitation, too, when they learned of it. I wondered—maybe we all wondered—whether Wilson knew that I was Philip’s girl.

As the date for the dinner approached, my co-editors did quite a bit of worrying and wondering. Yet nobody, including Philip, thought I should decline. With our high ambitions for the magazine, we could not consider that. Instead, we worried about me. The boys did not hide their fear that my political inexperience could make the magazine look foolish to that experienced older critic who knew such a great deal about Marxism and the U.S. social scene. And I was literary in the wrong way, not really modern, still interested in graduate-student stuff like Shakespeare and the Elizabethans. I was not as big a liability as George Morris; he had gone into the Workers Bookstore and asked for a copy of Trotsky’s The Revolution Betrayed, wearing spats and carrying a cane! He had been curious to read it, he said, having heard so much talk about it in the office, and had thought that a neighborhood bookstore with “Workers” in the name would be a good place to find it, never dreaming that it was the official Party place. Even after hearing this explanation, the boys were aghast. I knew better than that, of course, but I was politically undeveloped, prone to wonder whether the Tsar and his family needed to be killed. Clearly it nettled my fellow editors that I had been singled out to represent the magazine—why not one of them? With their excitable apprehensions, most evident in Philip and William, they were making me fearful myself of what I might say or do. There could be no reprieve: Wilson had called Margaret Marshall again to confirm the date and tell us to meet him at Mary’s—an Italian restaurant deep in the Village known to his generation.

At this point Fred Dupee came to my rescue. Since it looked as if the great critic did not drink, I would need some bucking up for the ordeal ahead, he decided, seeing me white and strained in my “dinner dress,” when I stopped by the office for a last-minute briefing. So he took me to the Hotel Albert bar, on University Place, and ordered Daiquiris, my favorite cocktail at the time. I must have had three.

Wilson and Peggy were already at Mary’s, in an upstairs private dining-room. Far from not drinking, he was ordering a second round of double Manhattans when I arrived. Naturally I took one, then a second, without saying that I had already had drinks with Fred. But if I had, it would have made no difference. Wilson was in a bibulous mood. And I learned why he had said no to drinks before lunch that day in the Union Square restaurant: he had had a colossal hangover, and the hair of the dog was not one of his weaknesses.

His habit, as I came to know, was to get thoroughly soused (which we were on our way to doing at Mary’s), then sleep it off and turn over a new leaf the next day on arising. Bathed and shaved, clad in snowy linen—he wore B.V.D.s—he emerged from his toilet reborn, or like a risen god. That he did not smoke probably helped. The glowing pink man we had taken to lunch was a resurrected Wilson, who had harried hell the night before. The boys, who had read I Thought of Daisy (I had not), might have guessed that the respected critic was no teetotaler.

After the double Manhattans, we drank dago red and finally B. & B. This was a favorite potion with Wilson, which I never came to like; for me, the sweetness of the Benedictine spoiled the taste of the brandy. All that liquor loosened my tongue, and I had what was called a talking jag. Since Wilson seemed interested, I told them the story of my life: Seattle, the flu, the death of my parents, Minneapolis, and certainly quite a bit about Uncle Myers, not omitting, I fear, the razor strop...Then, somehow, we were at the Chelsea Hotel, on West 23rd Street. Possibly we had dropped in on Ben Stolberg, who was living there at the time. I was no longer very conscious of Margaret Marshall, but she was still one of the party. Fairly soon, I hope, I “passed out.”

As I learned the next day, my inert form put them in a quandary. Neither Peggy nor Wilson knew where I lived. Ben Stolberg would not have known either. If they had tried looking in the phone book, they would not have found me—Philip and I had only recently moved in. Wilson, though no doubt very drunk, rose to the occasion. He took a room for himself—he was living in the country, near Stamford—and another for Margaret and me.

Opening an eye the morning after, I looked cautiously across to the next bed, having assessed that I was in a twin-bedded room. With an episode like the one with the man in the Brooks Brothers shirt behind me, I had reason to fear the worst. In the other bed, a yawning Margaret Marshall opened her eyes. There was no one else in the room, so far as I could see, and I guessed that we were in a hotel. I let a cry escape me, a loud groan or moan. It was the same awful certainty speaking that had just awakened me, like a voice in my ear: “Oh, God, oh, God, I’ve disgraced Partisan Review.” In my slip, I cried hopelessly while she looked on. Wilson must have gone back to Stamford. At any rate, we did not see him that morning. Doubtless he had paid our bill.

My first action, of course, was mandatory: call Philip. Maybe Peggy was kind enough to get the number for me when she saw how scared I was. They knew each other because he wrote reviews for her, for The Nation, but this was the first she knew of our living together. Anyway, while we were still in that hotel room, she talked to him. She told him that I had passed out and that Wilson, not knowing what to do with me, had persuaded her to stay with me in the Chelsea in the next bed. Philip believed her. Angry as he was, he felt pity for me. Either he came down in a taxi to get me or I took a taxi home by myself. I was still wearing my “dinner dress.” Either way, he forgave me. It was the second time, counting the Eastman’s-lap folly. I was horrified to think of the night he must have spent, not knowing what had happened to me. Probably he blamed Fred when he heard about the Daiquiris. But as the helmsman of a young, endangered periodical, he would not have allowed himself to be angry with Wilson.

Philip’s capacity for forgiveness will surprise people who thought of him (and wrote of him) as a gruff, rancorous man. But it is a fact and not to be fully explained by the strong attraction between us. In another man, this could have led to a fierce, jealous resentment. But Philip had an open heart and a childish, somewhat docile nature with those he had opened it to, few as they were. That he could accept my penitence—and not from any weakness—must have meant that he understood that I loved him. I did, and still do, vividly, as I write these words. Real love, said Hannah Arendt, is mutual. It is something that happens between two people. After much reflection, I agree with that. The other thing, the thing you read about in Proust, is infatuation (from fatuus, “foolish”); it is much commoner than love, and you can get over it. Years later, when Philip died and I wrote a little obituary on him, Hannah, on reading it, was astonished. “So, my dear, you loved him. I never knew.” Maybe, till she said it, I had not known it myself.

Another way of reconciling the common view of Philip held by his enemies—i.e., by most of the males of the PR circle—with my own experience of him is that he became unforgiving after what I did to his childlike heart. I hope it is not that.

What I have to relate now is painful to tell. To put it “as in a nutshell” (as Hannah, now dead, too, used to say), Philip still had a lot of forgiving to do; I mean forgiving of me. The next occasion was another dinner with Wilson. Again he asked the two of us, Peggy and me, as though we were wedded by our collaboration in his not very flexible mind, and again we accepted and again the scene was Mary’s. Again Philip did not interpose a veto. This time I did not have Daiquiris to prepare me and this time I did not pass out. Alas, no. Instead, after the B. & B.s, the three of us rode in a taxi all the way out to Stamford, where Wilson lived in a house he rented from Margaret De Silver (Baldwin Locomotive, the American Civil Liberties Union, Carlo Tresca) on the Mianus River. Fittingly, the house was named Trees. Again we did not call Philip, not, at any rate, till the next morning, when I conveyed an invitation from Wilson to take a train at Grand Central and join us. And Philip did.

At Trees, at one end of the colorless living-room, we had a lunch cooked by an old black maid named Hattie, who occupied a wing of the house with her grandchildren. Wilson was affable; probably he served Liebfraumilch, his preferred table wine after Château d’Yquem, and we talked about books and writers. Then Philip took me home on the train. I cannot remember what happened to Margaret Marshall. Perhaps she took an earlier train back, for I do not see her sharp little face or hear her thin voice at the lunch table. Could she have gone to see her friend and contributor Franz Hollering, who lived with his Czech movie-actress wife in a house on the Eitingon property? Yes, the same name the reader has heard about in the first chapter, in connection with Clifford Odets, Johnsrud, and Frank Merlin; Motty Eitingon, a fur importer, had ties with the Soviet Union. In any event, while Miss Marshall slept in a little guest room just down the hall, I had gone to bed with Wilson.

Yes. That had not been my intention when I followed him into his study (book-lined, of course) to continue, as I drunkenly thought, a conversation we were having. I greatly liked talking to him but was not attracted to him sexually. He was too old and too fat. Nevertheless, when he firmly took me into his arms, misunderstanding my intention, I gave up the battle. On the couch in the study, we drunkenly made love.

Some time before daylight, I left him and returned to the room that was supposed to be mine. I don’t think I saw him alone till many days later. At breakfast, produced by Hattie, we made no reference to what had happened. I called Philip, and we waited for him to come. It was only then, I believe, that Wilson understood that I lived with Philip. When he started to write to me, it was always to my office.

One day, a bit afterward, when we were finally able to talk—I had come out to Trees on the train, and we did not drink—I tried to explain to him my motives in returning to his study that night. But he would not listen to what I felt sure was the truth; only facts spoke to him, and the fact was that I had let him make love to me. Again, I gave up. You cannot argue against facts. And yet to this very day I am convinced that he had me wrong: I only wanted to talk to him. The reader will find an echo of this in Chapter Five of A Charmed Life, where Martha Sinnott, happily remarried, looks back on her first husband, the awful Miles Murphy: “She did not understand what had happened. She had only, she bemoaned, wanted to talk to him—a well-known playwright and editor, successful, positive, interested in her ideas and life-history.” (Let the reader be warned: A Charmed Life, though derived, like all books, from experience, is not an autobiographical novel, and Miles Murphy must not be taken for a disguised portrait of Wilson. Martha, I admit, is a bit like me—I tried to change her and failed, as I failed later with Domna Rejnev in The Groves of Academe.) Maybe, when I wrote A Charmed Life, I was fooling myself about Martha’s motives and am still fooling myself today, when I should be old enough to know better, about what drove me into Wilson’s study on that long-ago night. At present, my guess is that it was the unwillingness to end an evening that gets hold of people who have been drinking—anything, sex included, to avoid retiring. But that is a far cry from Wilson’s fond persuasion.

Whatever the truth was, that I did not confess to Philip what had happened during that night at Trees indicated that a relationship with Wilson was beginning. The two of us had a secret between us, and Philip became the outsider. In my office at Covici, sitting opposite the ever-disapproving Miss Broene, I embarked on a correspondence with Wilson. He wrote, and I answered. His letters to me are at Vassar; mine to him are at Yale. Reading mine over, I am surprised by the intimacy and friendliness of my tone. There is a note of tenderness and teasing. Apparently I liked him much more than I remember, more than I ever would again. What I hear in the letters is not love, though—I never loved Wilson—but sympathy, affection, friendship. Later, I grew to think of him as a monster; the minotaur, we called him in the family, Bowden [Broadwater] and I. The comparison is exact (he was even related to the Bull family on his mother’s side), and I may have felt a kind of friendship for the poor minotaur in his maze, so sadly dependent on the yearly sacrifice of maidens. But if, sensing that need, I warmed to Wilson, solitary among his trees, I did not guess that I would be one of the Athenian maidens with never a Theseus to rescue me.

If I had no premonition of what was in store, he, on his side, was hell-bent on my marrying him. He needed a wife “the worst way,” to use one of his expressions, having lost his second, Margaret Canby, in a fall down some steep stairs five years before. The women he had been having affairs with were either unwilling to marry him or unsuited to the job or both. When I met him, he must have been desperate. He could not take care of himself; the old black woman, Hattie, was a kind of nurse to him. Herbert Solow used to tell a story of arriving at Trees for a call during this time and hearing Wilson’s voice boom: “Hattie, Hattie! Where are my drawers?” He meant his underwear—those light lawn one-piece B.V.D.s he wore. He was comically dependent on old-fashioned terms. His bicycle was always “my wheel.” Had he owned or driven a car, it would have been “the machine.” His sexual organ, as readers of Hecate County discovered, was “my club”: “My club was pressing through the tight confines of my evening dress.”

No, I did not want to marry him. As a radical, I was against marriage. What happened is explained in A Charmed Life, in an analysis of the motive behind Martha’s first marriage. “The fatalistic side of her character accepted Miles as a punishment for the sin of having slept with him when she did not love him, when she loved, she still felt, someone else. Nevertheless, she had naively sought a compromise. She had begged Miles merely to live with him, as his mistress.” That was what I tried to sell Wilson on, quite nobly, I thought. But he was not interested. “I’ve had that,” he replied, without elaboration. So finally I agreed to marry him as my punishment for having gone to bed with him—this was certainly part of the truth. As a modern girl, I might not have called that a “sin”; I thought in logical rather than in religious terms. The logic of having slept with Wilson compelled the sequence of marriage if that was what he wanted. Otherwise my action would have no consistency; in other words, no meaning. I could not accept the fact that I had slept with this fat, puffing man for no reason, simply because I was drunk. No. It had to make sense. Marrying him, though against my inclinations, made it make sense. There is something faintly Kantian here. But I did not know Kant then. Maybe I was a natural Kantian.

Of course, other reasons contributed. The death of my grandfather (as I have mentioned) may have been one. It was not that Wilson stood in as a father figure for me exactly, but he was an older man (there were seventeen years between us) and came from the same stock, Anglo-Saxon, Presbyterian. His father, like Grandpa, had been a distinguished lawyer—Attorney General of New Jersey under Governor Woodrow Wilson. There was a certain feeling of coming home, to my own people.

Then there were the intellectual attractions he offered, all of which were beyond Philip: we were going to read Juvenal together, for example. Also, there was the whole world of Nature and the outdoors, so closed to Philip. We were going to ride horses along the trails above the river; we were going to fish for trout. We would look for wild flowers in the woods: spring beauty, bloodroot, hepatica, trillium. Some of this we actually did. After we were married, we rode a few times, uninspiring horses; we caught perch and sunfish, if not trout, in the Mianus, and Edmund knew the wild flowers quite well. He taught me their names, for which I am still grateful. But we never read Juvenal.

It was an idyl he was offering me, and not wholly false. He, too, must have hoped that it would be like that. Probably I was stirred by memories of Lake Crescent and the morning walk to Marymere Falls, of Major Mathews and the spring woods near Tacoma. Those had been the happiest moments of my life. Though Wilson could furnish me no waterfalls, no carpets of violets, he had a wonderful gorge, I found, just up the river, with an icy green transparent pool at the bottom. I loved that. His own anticipation must have centered on having an intellectual girl for a wife—the first one. After a protracted siege to Edna Millay, he had been “stuck on” the poet Léonie Adams. But Léonie had cared about women (Margaret Mead had been his principal rival), and now she was married to Bill Troy.

Besides the inducements of a shared classical education and the outdoors, he offered me the promise that marrying him would “do something” for me, that is, for my literary gift. “Rahv doesn’t do anything for you,” he argued, meaning that Rahv was slothfully content to have me do those theatre columns, which, according to Wilson, were not up to my real measure. “You draw a crushing brief against a play,” he said. I did not exactly see what was wrong with that, but in fact he had put his finger on a limitation. I was not as narrow as Sidney Hook but I did treat most of the authors I wrote about as though they were under indictment. The tendency, evidently, was aggravated by Trotskyism. It was Wilson’s belief that I ought not to be writing criticism—I had a talent, he thought, for imaginative writing. This was the opposite of what dear Miss Kitchel had decided for me at Vassar.

Looking back, I can see that he was right where Philip was concerned. If it had been left to Rahv, I never would have written a single “creative” word. And I do not hold it against him; on the contrary. His love, unlike Wilson’s, was from the heart. He cared for what I was, not for what I might evolve into. Whatever I might be made to be, with skillful encouragement, did not interest him. To say this today may seem hard on Wilson, as well as ungrateful on my part for what he did, in the first months of our marriage, to push me into “creativity.” If he had not shut the door firmly on the little room he had shepherded me into (the same room Margaret Marshall had slept in), I would not be the “Mary McCarthy” you are now reading. Yet, awful to say, I am not particularly grateful.

At the time, I was not swayed by the argument of what he, compared with Philip, could do for me. It seemed mercenary. The picture of a powerful man trying with various baits and lures to rob a weaker man of his chief treasure was not very appealing. But Wilson never saw that angle. He saw what he perceived as my self-interest, to be furthered by my marriage to him. From the outside, however, things looked different. I remember that somebody of the PR circle—Delmore or Harold Rosenberg—was widely quoted as saying that Mary left Philip for Wilson because Wilson had a better prose style. I am not sure that Wilson did, or not always, and it would have been a bad reason, had it been operative, which of course it was not. My own explanation (if I must give but a single one) for my yielding to Wilson is the Marxist explanation. It was the same old class struggle that Philip and I had been waging from the moment we fell in love.

Wilson, relatively speaking, was upper class. That was all there was to it. Though he commanded a higher word rate, he was scarcely better heeled than Philip on the WPA. Wilson made more money, which he spent on taxis, liquor, long-distance phone calls. There was nothing left for clothes or furniture or jewelry, all of which I cared about. He could not do without taxis, booze, the long-distance telephone, and hence regarded them in the light of necessities. Another addiction (I almost forgot) was book-binding, which was just then beginning to take hold of him. In terms of wealth, he was hard to situate. Though he could seldom pay the phone bill without hasty recourse to his mother, you could not call him poor, since he always had enough to eat. Neither could you say he was rich.

One material inducement that counted in the decision I was being pressed to make was his promise that we would have children. Philip was in no position to offer that; he was still not free to marry, lacking the price of a divorce, and he was not keen on the idea of progeny even in later life, when he was free and could afford it—he never had any children. But Wilson made good on that. He took me to New York in a taxi for my lying-in, though we had no clothes of our own for the newborn Reuel. My friend Florine Katz gave me her baby clothes, rubber pants, and diapers; her baby scales, I think, too. Wilson’s mother had to be appealed to for the baby carriage when we were leaving the hospital. Once we were back home, the Bathinette gave rise to a crisis (he thought we didn’t need one), and I forget how we managed for a playpen. No doubt it was old Mrs. Wilson once again to the rescue.

But I am going too fast. There was a time when I had not yet agreed to marry him but was taking the train out to Stamford and the milk train back while Philip, somehow, remained in ignorance. I also met Wilson at least once for dinner in New York, and there was some question of a showing of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (his choice). As he continued to “press his suit,” each time I managed a stolen meeting—once I pretended to have gone to a prize fight (with Mannie, I suppose)—I was risking the unthinkable: Philip’s discovery. Possibly I hoped that the affair with Wilson would come to an end all by itself somehow, thus relieving me of having to tell Philip.

Well, finally I told him. Wilson was “at” me to do it, till one night I did. But before I go ahead with that melancholy story, I must make a confession. Since starting this chapter I have been rereading the letters I wrote on Covici-Friede Inc. stationery to “Mr. Edmund Wilson, Westover Road, Stamford, Connecticut.” And they tell me, among other things, that Peggy Marshall was very much present at lunch with Wilson on that morning after at Trees. Listen to this, from my second letter, written on a “Tuesday afternoon” in reply to one from him; the postmark is November 30, 1937:

“Sunday was a bad day for me...When you took Peggy on your lap, something happened to my face that I couldn’t stop. Philip leaned over to me and said, ‘I know something about you,’ and I said, ‘I know you do,’ and he said, ‘You’re jealous,’ and I said, ‘Yes.’ He attributed it, however, to an extreme coquettishness, and didn’t look further for explanations.”

When he took Peggy on his lap, was he sitting at the table or was it on the sofa? Grotesque! Did he do it to throw Philip off the scent? If so, it was a good move. Incredibly, though the letters were going back and forth for more than a month and a half, right through Christmas, and I was meeting Wilson about once a week, Philip seems to have had no suspicion. How shameful a successful deception is! But maybe he was so secure in his own manhood that he was unable to think of Wilson as any kind of rival.

When at last I told him, after the first starts of surprise, he took the news very soberly. He was struck by the marriage proposal into a kind of thoughtfulness. It was as though the situation was too grave for anger. His big dark eyes with their prominent whites grew still, as if wounded. “What do you want to do, Mary?” he said gently. Probably I cried and told him that I didn’t know: Wilson was in such a hurry; he was rushing me.

Obviously I don’t remember the details of the conversation; probably there was more than one. Maybe I cooked our dinner in the middle of it. Or we went to bed and got up. The gist was that Philip begged me, for both our sakes, to take my time. He appeared to consider for me, like a more experienced brother. With Wilson, there was the age difference, he pointed out. And I was young enough to wait a while to have children. Before deciding anything I ought to talk it over with an older person, not my grandmother (she was too old) but someone who could be told that he and I were living together. Why not Nathalie Swan’s mother, a society woman but rather intellectual?

Reluctantly, Wilson agreed that I could think about it. Late in January, I telephoned Mrs. Swan and went up to stay with her at the Swans’ country house near Salisbury, Connecticut. Nathalie came along or followed in a day or two. Being the person I was, in the midst of my grief for Philip, I was excited by the momentousness of it all. Having such a big decision to mull over made me feel important. Mrs. Swan, no doubt, was flattered to be consulted; she was aware of Wilson as a literary figure. It did not subtract from the solemnity of the occasion to be waited on by a butler and maids, to drink Mrs. Swan’s society Martini (gin and two vermouths) before lunch and Joe Swan’s vintage wine with meals, and to have coffee with hot milk on my breakfast tray. In other words, I enjoyed myself. It was a long time since I had stayed in the Swan country house, where everything was perfect. Meanwhile, Philip waited for the result in our apartment. I don’t recall where Wilson was. Probably he was besieging me with impatient telephone calls.

Mrs. Swan had the good sense to listen while remaining neutral. If she gave me any advice, it was “Wait a little longer.” Yes! Precisely! But that was wise counsel I did not want to hear. To resist that advice was to precipitate myself into Wilson’s arms. He understood that very well, though I did not. To this day, I can’t make out whether I “really” wanted to marry Wilson or prayed to be spared it.

I took the train back from Salisbury. After that, I remember nothing till days later, when I was on the train with Edmund, going down to his mother’s place in Red Bank, New Jersey. I had told Philip my decision, spent a few nights at Trees, had a Wassermann (or didn’t you need a Wassermann in New Jersey?), quit my job, and was feeling miserable. I looked at the tall grasses outside the train window and looked the other way, into Wilson’s closed face, the narrow lips set in a tight line. I do not know whether Philip and I had made love in our bed when I came back from staying at Salisbury. I hope so. Then had come the chilly day when we divided our possessions. I remember the result but not the painful event: Philip took the tall steel lamp and the tweed-covered armchair, as I’ve said; I took some boldly designed Italian plates, my mother’s silver, and the red love seat, which stayed with me through two more marriages. Each took his own books. Did we have the 1911 Britannica or had that gone to Johnsrud?

Needless to say, Wilson and I were being married in a civil ceremony, at the Red Bank city hall. Our witnesses were two town employees. Afterward we went back to Edmund’s mother’s house. She was a stumpy downright old lady with an ear trumpet and a loud, deaf voice. She looked like a warthog, Bowden eventually decided, basing himself on my description and an illustration in Webster’s Collegiate—he had never seen Mrs. Wilson nor an actual warthog in the flesh. But that was pretty much how she looked. Wilson inherited his body structure from her family, the Kimballs. His nose and forehead came from his father. At lunch—a pretty fruit jelly for dessert—I was introduced to Jenny, her companion, rather elderly herself, and to a cook and a driver. Mrs. Wilson was in the habit of sitting all day long at a living-room window of her sizable house on Vista Place, ticking off the people that had died in the houses across the street. This was her house. According to Edmund, her first words on watching her husband die in the house they had always lived in were “Now I can have my new house.” She was a gruff personality who did not much approve of Edmund; he believed that she held it against him that his large head had torn her vaginal tissues as he was being born. There was not much love lost between them. Yet there was a kind of grumbly, unwilling attachment. They were more alike than they knew. When Dos Passos’ beautiful wife, Katy, was decapitated in an automobile accident, Edmund’s first remark, made after visiting Dos in the Boston hospital, was “Now he can get married and have some children.”

He was dependent on his mother for money, because his father’s estate (not large) had been left entirely to her. What Edmund saw as his rightful share she doled out to him as though it were bounty. Yet the fact was that the bulk of her capital was hers by family inheritance, wisely invested for her by a stockbroker brother, Edmund’s uncle Win. She had a good head for money and rated her brothers higher than her husband.

One of her complaints about Edmund was his proneness to marry unsuitable women. She had already brought up a child of his first marriage, to the actress Mary Blair. When the little girl (according to Edmund) had been left by her mother in front of an open window while sick with the flu, he had removed her bodily to Red Bank and deposited her with his mother, where she remained till now. I did not meet Rosalind on the day of our wedding because she was fifteen and away at boarding-school. But her home was still Red Bank. His second wife, Margaret, was a drinker, his mother thought. And now he had married me.

After lunch, he left me to sit opposite the old lady and shout into her ear trumpet, while he himself climbed upstairs to “his” room to read or sleep. I was surprised when he did this on our first, newlywed visit, but I soon understood that it must have been his habit with all his wives: part of a wife’s function was to address his mother’s defective hearing. She appeared to like me well enough; the complaints she voiced to me about Edmund could be taken as a sign of friendship. I imagine that she handed him a nice check for a wedding present as we were leaving for New York. She gave me her cheek to kiss.

It had been arranged that in the evening he would meet two of my brothers in the bar of the New Weston Hotel, where we were spending our wedding night. Since neither of my brothers remembers anything of this except the fact that it happened, it looks as if it had gone all right. Kevin and Preston had come to New York from Minneapolis this January with a friend to try their luck, Kevin and the friend as actors, Preston as a photographer. They were living in a room on West 23rd Street and had very little money. It was Preston who got discouraged first and went home, where he got a little help from our uncle Lou in Minneapolis. Kevin hung on. On the day of the meeting with Wilson, all three still had hopes.

My brothers were both good-looking boys in the McCarthy way—dark hair, light eyes, long dark eyelashes. And of course they were shy as they talked of their plans. Wilson took no exception to them that I noticed while we were sitting with drinks—no more than two or three. But upstairs in the bedroom (this was our honeymoon), he suddenly burst out and told me my brothers were agents of the GPU. He was very drunk, more drunk than I had seen him before, and at first he did not make himself clear. He had started with innuendo, lurching on to accusation. I could not believe I was hearing right; it was some sort of joke, I guessed. When I finally knew he was serious, I was at a loss as to how to refute the charge, since I could not see what had led up to it. Even now, I still have no notion. I may guess that in the bar he had sensed a plot thickening against him: I had tricked him into marriage so as to deliver him to the GPU through these brothers of mine who were agents. He grunted some threats, but he did not hit me. Abruptly he fell asleep. I lay awake, silently weeping. The marriage was over, I had to assume.

In a sense that was true. It was the end of my high hopes for a “classical” life. No more idyl. The next morning is a blank for me. If I confronted him with “Why did you call my brothers GPU agents?” he evaded an answer with “Come along now; we have a train to catch,” or something of the sort. If I said nothing, he said nothing. And he never reverted to the subject. When Kevin came out to Trees that spring to ask for help, he gave him a five-dollar bill. No mention to me of “Your brother, the agent.” I suppose that the wedding night had brought on an access of paranoia—dread of being “tied down”? The political arena at that time was highly sensitized. We both thought in those terms. Probably he saw me as a Trotskyite girl, the reverse, of course, of a Stalinist agent, but in hallucination extremes meet. Had he faced up the next day to what he had done, we might have been friends again, and the charge would have been reason for laughter: “I thought Mary’s brothers were GPU agents.” But perhaps he did not know me well enough to expose himself by an admission of error. In later years sometimes he would feel sorry and apologize.

During that bad night I assessed my situation. I was alone, with no one to turn to. Philip and my job were gone. Grandpa was dead; my only friends were people like Eunice Clark who were not real friends. Martha McGahan, whom I loved, had moved to California. My marriage was a mistake. I clearly saw that I never should have married this peculiar man, yet I did not have the courage to take my suitcase and go off somewhere by myself. That would have been Miss Sandison’s counsel. And where was she, dear Miss Sandison, when I needed her? Probably in the British Museum working on Arthur Gorges.

Yet in reality nothing is as bad as it seems (or as, in logic, it ought to be). That badly injured marriage lasted seven more years, though it is true that it never recovered.