Free Cannibals and Missionaries by Mary McCarthy Page B

cross a second time, at another round table, there was seldom any further question of sex. Yet she remembered and, meeting their eyes in the course of some boring presentation, she knew they remembered too.
    Thanks to her mother, she did not have to feel tied to Lucy Skinner. Mamma had made a home for her. She had her room, with her familiar things; her old trunks were stored in the cellar; in the den were her photograph albums. There were files of her correspondence in the attic, her doctoral thesis, programs of seminars she had attended, with the papers that had been read. Her summer dresses were waiting for her, hung up in bags, with lavender. But that was another thing: her mother was getting on. When she went, Aileen would be alone, with no center to her life. A room at one of her sisters’ with full-grown children under foot would not be the same at all. It was Mamma’s fault that she had never been domestic. She had mastered a few French and Mexican recipes for entertaining, and her sisters had taught her to iron. But housekeeping was Mamma’s sphere, so that Aileen had not been able to develop her own touch and style, except in clothes. The President’s house at Lucy Skinner bore few marks of her occupancy beyond some gay pillows she had scattered about, for students to sit on the floor on, some old prints of French cities, and her record collection. Buildings and Grounds supplied flowers twice a week and arranged them—she did not have Mamma’s “hand” with bouquets—and the china and glassware she used reflected the taste of old Miss Smith, her predecessor. Even if Aileen had known how, she would not have tried to make the impersonal house homey.
    She spent most of her time in her office, surrounded by the clacketing of typewriters and the ringing of telephones in the anteroom. At night, when she was not invited out to dinner or entertaining officially, she would eat in one of the student dining-halls or sit down at a table in the college snack bar, where a group would immediately join her. She dropped in on classes, films, exhibitions, lectures, and could usually be counted on to rise in the audience, wrapped in a bright shawl, and ask the first question. After college events, she would have students and faculty in for drinks. These habits had made her popular; Miss Smith, a shy academic woman, had been almost a recluse.
    No one would have guessed—she thought—that underneath her liveliness was an awful fear of loneliness. Though she had been living by herself for nearly thirty years, she was seldom, in practice, alone. If she had to be alone for a whole evening, she poured herself a bourbon, listened to the news, telephoned, played the phonograph. She had lost the feeling she had had as a girl that a book could be a companion, which meant that she read less and less. She hated silence and sitting still and when she sank into meditation (as now perforce, on the plane), her thoughts were a kind of noise she kept going in her head. But she was getting a bit cracked, she feared. After a few drinks recently, playing Carmen one night, she had danced all by herself, clicking a pair of castanets she had brought back years ago from Mexico and stamping her heels, forgetful of how grotesque she would have looked if anyone had peeked in. Fortunately, the President’s house was in an isolated position, on a hillock.
    Late at night often, she would pick up the telephone and call her mother or one of her sisters; with the time difference, they would not be asleep yet. This lifeline to Arkansas, at arm’s reach when all else failed, had made her neglectful of the fact that her youth had gone while she was looking the other way. Of course fifty today was not old. There were examples of women older than herself who got husbands: George Eliot was sixty when she married Mr. Cross. But George Eliot was an exception for whom the laws of probability did not count. Aileen knew herself to be no such awesome phenomenon;