The Oasis by Mary McCarthy Page A

sounded forced in his ears—could anyone honestly mean them? His wife hated cooking and would never adjust herself to using those clumsy old devices. Ever since the Second War, they had been doing without a regular maid; she seemed to prefer it that way, now that the children’s rooms were empty, just the two of them alone in the house. She liked bakery cakes, ready mixes, redispreads, rolls from the delicatessen; she often had him stop at the S. S. Pierce cold meat counter or the Home Foods department at Schrafft’s on Tremont Street to bring in something for supper. A nice little steak or some chops she did not mind doing, and Sundays, if she had to, if the parents were coming to dinner, she would put her roast in a self-basting pan, set the thermometer on the oven, and go upstairs to lie down. He knew Eva’s habits very well, and he could see that she was not going to get along at all with these younger women ecstasizing over bread tins and butter churns.
    Eva’s objections, however, were not the paramount question. Guessing how things would be, he had left an order with S. S. Pierce to send them a weekly food package—canned fruit, hams, hard salamis, smoked salmon, sandwich mixes, and a bottle or two of sparkling burgundy to be slipped in by a friendly clerk. His wife’s niceties and nerves, her hostilities andresistance to change he had jollied along for years; he almost loved them in her, identifying them with the womanly; he thought her more fastidious than himself and her aversion to the outdoors, he took for a mark of superiority, like her linen pumps and her nylons and her bad times of the month. That Eva would be out of her element here, he had accepted from the start; only the imminent war had made her consent to accompany him; and he was grateful enough for her presence to resign himself to her disapproval, though even now, despite thirty years of experience, he would not quite part with the hope (which he chided in himself as treasonable) that the caustic little queen of his household could become the comrade of his pleasures. But an allegiance even more profound than what he owed his wife’s happiness was being shaken by the behavior of the Utopians. His loyalty to the modern was challenged.
    The modern, with Joe, was a true passion and a cause, something more than a painter’s convention or a designer’s style. A great personal sincerity invested his feelings on this subject, for he was already a modern painter before he discovered the modern movement; the few lessons he had had in a business man’s art club in Boston had taught him only what he now called “a sterile academicism”—he had had to work out his idiom alone in his own backyard. The coincidence between his own efforts and the paintings of the School of Paris, pointed out to him finally by his amazed children, convinced him of the authenticityof the revelation he had had. Under the influence of a teacher who gave lessons in art by correspondence, he came quickly to believe that the modern was some sort of duty laid on every man who had heard its call, a system of knowledge and perception equivalent to revealed religion—and for all those born too early to receive its message, for Raphael and Shakespeare, he felt a kind of pity like that of the pious Christian for the deprived souls of the ancients, who died too soon to get the benefit of the Redemption. The routines of factory and family life, much as he respected them, had long impeded his progress in spontaneous self-expression, so that the summons to Utopia, when it came, had reached him like an awaited signal. When his son felt it necessary to warn him that the colonists held advanced opinions, Joe at once prepared himself for a rigorous testing of his convictions in the crucible of practice. He had flexed his will for cabins built like iceboxes, steel chairs or none, a long communal table in the shape of a streak of lightning, people reciting poems and wearing eccentric