Read Online Cast a Cold Eye by Mary McCarthy - Free Book Online

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,