The Company She Keeps by Mary McCarthy

rueful delight.
    The Hermitage Galleries, however, saw him through, and the client, who had been looking for a pretext to break with his wife, readily forgave him. Mr. Sheer grew more despondent than ever, and his health began to worry him. He had a masseur in the morning, and he went to a gymnasium in the evening; he subjected himself to basal-metabolism tests, urinalyses, blood counts, took tonics to pep him up and bromides to quiet him and was still, unaccountably, tired. Last year they took out his appendix and his teeth; when he recovered, he had not lost that daily, dragging fatigue, but only acquired an appetite for the knife.
    I saw him off to the hospital recently to have his gall bladder removed.
    “It’s a very dangerous operation, Margaret; it may be the death of me,” he said.
    And for the first time in many weeks he giggled irrepressibly.
    *An extract from memoirs begun by the heroine.

THREE The Man in the Brooks Brothers Shirt

T HE NEW MAN WHO came into the club car was coatless. He was dressed in gray trousers and a green shirt of expensive material that had what seemed to be the figure “2” embroidered in darker green on the sleeve. His tie matched the green of the monogram, and his face, which emerged rather sharply from this tasteful symphony in cool colors, was blush pink. The greater part of his head appeared to be pink, also, though actually toward the back there was a good deal of closely cropped pale-gray hair that harmonized with his trousers. He looked, she decided, like a middle-aged baby, like a young pig, like something in a seed catalogue. In any case, he was plainly Out of the Question, and the hope that had sprung up, as for some reason it always did, with the sound of a new step soft on the flowered Pullman carpet, died a new death. Already the trip was half over. They were now several hours out of Omaha; nearly all the Chicago passengers had put in an appearance; and still there was no one, no one at all. She must not mind, she told herself; the trip West was of no importance; yet she felt a curious, shamefaced disappointment, as if she had given a party and no guests had come.
    She turned again to the lady on her left, her vis-à-vis at breakfast, a person with dangling earrings, a cigarette holder, and a lorgnette, who was somebody in the New Deal and carried about with her a typewritten report of the hearings of some committee which she was anxious to discuss. The man in the green shirt crowded himself into a love seat directly opposite, next to a young man with glasses and loud socks who was reading Vincent Sheean’s Personal History. Sustaining her end of a well-bred, well-informed, liberal conversation, she had an air of perfect absorption and earnestness, yet she became aware, without ever turning her head, that the man across the way had decided to pick her up. Full of contempt for the man, for his coatlessness, for his color scheme, for his susceptibility, for his presumption, she nevertheless allowed her voice to rise a little in response to him. The man countered by turning to his neighbor and saying something excessively audible about Vincent Sheean. The four voices, answering each other, began to give an antiphonal effect, Vincent Sheean was a fine fellow, she heard him pronounce; he could vouch for it, he knew him personally. The bait was crude, she reflected. She would have preferred the artificial fly to the angleworm, but still…. After all, he might have done worse; judged by eternal standards, Sheean might not be much, but in the cultural atmosphere of the Pullman car, Sheean was a titan. Moreover, if one judged the man by his intention, one could not fail to be touched. He was doing his best to please her. He had guessed from her conversation that she was an intellectual, and was placing the name of Sheean as a humble offering at her feet. And the simple vulgarity of the offering somehow enhanced its value; it was like one of those home-made cakes with Paris-green