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enthusiasm of the obscure Francis Cleary, whom up to that time the wife had seldom thought about. In the long war of marriage, in the battle of the friends, Francis Cleary was an open city. Undefended, he remained immune, as though an inconspicuous white flag fluttered in his sharkskin lapel. The very mention of his name brought a certain kind of domestic argument to a dead stop. (“You don’t like my friends.” “I do too like your friends.” “No, you don’t, you hate them.” “That’s not true,” and—triumphantly—“I like Francis Cleary.”)
    A symbol of tolerance, of the spirit of compromise, he came into his own whenever one of his friends married. A man who in his single state had lunched with Francis Cleary once or twice a year would discover to his astonishment, after two or three years of marriage, that Francis Cleary was now his closest friend: he was invited regularly for weekends, for dinner, for cocktail parties; he made the invariable fourth at bridge or tennis. Though he might never have been asked to the wedding ceremony (and in fact it was more usual for the wife to have him introduced to her quite by chance a few months later, in a restaurant, and to experience a kind of Aristotelian recognition—“Why hasn’t Jack ever spoken of you? You must come to dinner next Thursday”), his azalea plant or cyclamen would be the first to arrive at the hospital when the baby was born.
    If it was the wife who had originally been Francis Cleary’s friend, the graph of intimacy would follow the same curve. A mild admirer who had always figured in the background of her life, imperceptibly he would have slid to the very center of the composition: he came to stay for two weeks in the summer, played chess with her husband, and took her to dinner when she was alone in town. He had become “your friend Francis Cleary,” a walking advertisement of her husband’s good nature. “How can you say I am jealous?” he would ask. “You had lunch with Francis Cleary only last week.” Left by herself with this old friend, she would—as she had always done—get bored, play the phonograph, make excuses to go to the kitchen to see how the maid was getting along with the hollandaise. Yet at her husband’s suggestion she would invite him again and again, because his presence in the house reassured her, told her that marriage had not really changed her, that she was still free to see her own friends, that her husband was a generous, fair-minded man who could not, naturally, be expected to share every one of her tastes. Moreover, it was so easy to have Francis Cleary. When her real friends came, something unpleasant usually happened—an argument, an ill-considered reference to the past—or if nothing actually happened, she suffered in the expectation of its happening, so that when they finally left she echoed her husband’s “Thank God, that’s over!” in the silence of her heart. A few awkward evenings, a weekend would serve, in most cases, to convince her that the love she felt for her friends was a positive obstacle to her happiness; and she would renounce it, though perhaps only provisionally (telling herself that surely, later on, in precisely the right circumstances Jim would come to see these people as she did—just as she was sure that sometime, next week or next year, Jim would come to like string beans, if she served them to him in a moment of intimacy and with precisely the right sauce). Meanwhile, however, it was certainly better to have Francis Cleary, who was after all a close friend of her real friends (had she not met him through them?), and as the years passed the distinction between her “real” friends and Francis Cleary would blur in her mind and she would imagine that he had always been one of her dearest associates.
    His social mobility derived from the fact that he was capable of being used by other people as a symbol, and a symbol not only of an idea (e.g., tolerance) but of an actual