Patricia McCardle

Patricia McCardle is the principal contributor and head ramrod of the New England Poetry Caravan, an organizer whose exacting control of the tour is matched by a sharp, combative manner. She hires Jim Gardener to fill a last-minute vacancy, but their already contentious working relationship deteriorates as his drinking and public accusations threaten the performances. At a reception, she tries to silence his outburst; when he leaves, she strikes him and publicly invokes the fact that he shot his own wife, a revelation that turns their quarrel into an indictment of Gardener’s past.

Identity and Background

McCardle is described as long-legged and slender, with an aristocratic, blade-like nose, a high forehead, and glacier-gray eyes. Her appearance is filtered in part through Gardener’s unflattering recollection: he once imagined kissing her and recoiled at the image of her nose slicing his cheek like a razor. The description conveys the antagonistic charge between them, while also showing how readily Gardener converts irritation into a vivid, cruel joke.

She traces her ancestry to the Mayflower, and the narration associates her Puritan inheritance with her dislike of being called Patty. The name is a deliberate provocation for Gardener, just as his familiarity with her habits gives their exchanges the texture of a quarrel that began well before the events described. She is not merely an administrator in these scenes: she has authority over the tour’s bookings, contractual terms, and the continuation of Gardener’s paid work.

The Emergency Hire

McCardle had worked with Gardener before, and there had been trouble between them. In 1988, she was organizing a six-poet summer tour when one of the poets, Bill Claughtsworth, died by suicide shortly before the Caravan’s engagements. His absence left the group short of the announced number of performers and placed the company in technical contractual default. McCardle had twelve readings and fairly good advances at stake, and she was unwilling to treat the missing poet as a loophole that could be ignored.

She tried four replacement poets, each less suitable than the last. With only thirty-six hours before the first reading, she called Gardener and asked directly whether he was still drinking. He claimed that he drank a little but was not bingeing. Their conversation immediately resumed its familiar sparring: Gardener called her Patty, knowing that she hated the diminutive, while she called him Jimmy, a name he disliked. Their antagonism is mutual and specific; each knows which small insult will get under the other’s skin.

The agreement suited both parties without making either trust the other. Gardener wanted a good used wood furnace before winter; his house was so cold that he had been bundling himself beside the kitchen stove, with plastic stapled over the windows against the wind. McCardle needed a poet to complete the Caravan’s program. She drove down from Derry with a contract in triplicate and a notary public, making clear that the arrangement would be governed by formal terms rather than an informal promise.

Those terms also gave McCardle leverage. If Gardener left the tour for a reason she did not accept, his unpaid fees would be forfeited and the three hundred dollars already advanced would have to be repaid within thirty days. Gardener believed she would enforce the agreement, possibly taking him to court. The contract thus bound him to the tour even as their personal antagonism made cooperation precarious; McCardle’s managerial authority and Gardener’s need for the money were inseparable from the insults they traded.

Conflict on Tour

At a gathering attended by Ted the Power Man and others, Gardener turned a discussion of nuclear power into an accusation. He cited contamination, elevated cancer rates, and information he said power companies kept in their files. McCardle stepped forward and warned him to stop, attempting to contain the confrontation before it became a public crisis. Her intervention could not restore the room’s composure: Ted’s wife began asking what Ted knew, and Gardener continued pressing the issue.

The outburst escalated. Gardener shouted that people should stop staying silent while a house burned, and invoked the death of Karen Silkwood as an example of what could happen to those who did not. He then directed further claims about infant deaths, birth defects, and blindness at Ted’s tearful wife. The host, Arberg, ordered him out. McCardle’s effort to control the scene was therefore not simply a dispute over manners: Gardener’s accusations had shifted the room’s attention from his poetry to the dangers he believed were being concealed, and had made his continued presence untenable.

As Gardener headed for the door, a woman screamed at him to leave. The voice was McCardle’s, but unlike her usual purring manner, it sounded hysterical. He turned, and she struck him with a roundhouse slap. Her anger had broken through the practiced composure with which she usually managed him and the Caravan’s public occasions.

The Rupture Between Them

McCardle told Gardener that he was a worthless, drunken, contentious, obsessive, bullying, ugly human being and threatened to fix him. Gardener answered with a sexual taunt, treating her anger as an invitation and turning the confrontation into another opportunity to mock her. Ron Cummings laughed nearby. McCardle struck Gardener again, this time catching his ear, before making the accusation that changed the terms of the scene: she should not have expected better from a man who would shoot his own wife.

Gardener responded by taking the drink from Cummings’s hand and emptying the whiskey into the bodice of McCardle’s black dress. He offered a sarcastic toast and left. The gesture is at once an assaultive humiliation and a staged exit: even in the face of McCardle’s revelation, he tries to control the last moment by making it a performance. But her statement has already punctured the flippancy of their exchange. Their feud is no longer only about his drinking, the tour, or the names they use for one another; it exposes the violence that lies behind Gardener’s comic defiance.

Narrative Role

McCardle’s scenes establish a relationship built from reciprocal knowledge and antagonism. She understands Gardener’s drinking and knows how the contract can constrain him; he understands her rigidity well enough to provoke it by calling her Patty. Their exchanges create a dry, often funny surface, but the humor repeatedly turns sharp: his need for money keeps him on the tour, her authority makes that dependence enforceable, and the scene at Arberg’s house reveals the cost hidden beneath his swagger.

Her role is also to resist Gardener’s attempts to make every conflict serve his own performance. She tries to stop his accusations, orders him out in fury, and finally names the fact that his jokes and insults cannot erase. The confrontation does not resolve their working relationship; it leaves the reader with its central contradiction, that McCardle can be both the hard-driving organizer who hires a difficult poet and the person who publicly confronts him with the truth about his marriage.