Cast a Cold Eye by Mary McCarthy Read Free Book Online Page B

not mourn for Francis, because he did not mourn for himself. He cast no shadow behind him of thwarted ambition, un-consummated 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