The Group

by Mary McCarthy

  At this moment, the door opened and Elinor Eastlake was shown in by a waiter, to whom she handed two brown-paper parcels she was carrying in her black kid-gloved hand; she appeared perfectly composed. “Her name is Elinor,” whispered Dottie. “We call her Lakey because her last name is Eastlake and she comes from Lake Forest, outside of Chicago.” “Thank you,” said Mr. Brown, but he made no move to leave Dottie’s side and continued to talk to her in an undertone, out of the corner of his mouth, offering wry comments on the wedding party. Harald had hold of Lakey’s hand, which he swung back and forth, as he stood back to admire her suit, a Patou model. His quick, lithe movements went oddly with his solemn long head and face, almost as if his head, a thinking machine, did not belong to him and had been clapped on his body in a masquerade. He was an intensely self-absorbed young man, as the girls knew from his letters, and when he spoke of his career, as he was doing now to Lakey, he had a detached impersonal eagerness, as though he were discussing disarmament or deficit spending. Yet he was attractive to women, as the girls knew from his letters too; the group admitted that he had S.A., the way some homely men teachers and clergymen had, and there was something about him, a dynamic verve, that made Dottie wonder, even now, as she and her companion watched him, how Kay had brought him to the point. The idea that Kay might be enceinte had stolen more than once into her quiet thoughts, though Kay, according to herself, knew all about taking precautions and kept a douche in Harald’s closet.

  “Have you known Kay long?” asked Dottie curiously, remembering in spite of herself the toilet he had mentioned in the hall of Harald’s rooming house. “Long enough,” replied Mr. Brown. This was so cruelly outright that Dottie flinched, just as though it had been said of her, at her own wedding reception. “I don’t like girls with big legs,” he said, with a reassuring smile—Dottie’s legs and slim, well-shod feet were her best points. Disloyally, Dottie looked with him at Kay’s legs, which were indeed rather beefy. “A sign of peasant forbears,” he said, waving a finger. “The center of gravity’s too low—a mark of obstinacy and obtuseness.” He studied Kay’s figure, which was outlined by the thin dress; as usual, she was not wearing a girdle. “A touch of steatopygy.” “What?” whispered Dottie. “Excessive development of the rump. Let me get you a drink.” Dottie was thrilled and horrified; she had never had such a risqué conversation. “You and your social friends,” he continued, “have a finer functional adaption. Full, low-slung breasts”—he stared about the room—“fashioned to carry pearls and bouclé sweaters and faggoting and tucked crepe de Chine blouses. Narrow waists. Tapering legs. As a man of the last decade, I prefer the boyish figure myself: a girl in a bathing cap poised to jackknife on a diving board. Marblehead summer memories; Betty is a marvelous swimmer. Thin women are more sensual; scientific fact—the nerve ends are closer to the surface.” His grey eyes narrowed, heavy-lidded, as though he were drifting off to sleep. “I like the fat one, though,” he said abruptly, singling out Pokey Prothero. “She has a thermal look. Nacreous skin, plumped with oysters. Yum, yum, yum; money, money, money. My sexual problems are economic. I loathe under-privileged women, but my own outlook is bohemian. Impossible combination.”

  To Dottie’s relief, the waiters came in with the breakfast—eggs Benedict—and Kay shooed everyone to the table. She put the best man, a very silent person who worked on the Wall Street Journal (advertising department), on her own right, and Helena Davison on Harald’s right, but after that all was confusion. Dottie was left stranded at the end of the table between Libby, her bête noire, and the radio man’s wife, who was a stylist at Russeks (and who, of course, should have been seated on Harald’s left). It was a hard table to seat, with so many girls; still, a more tactful hostess could have arranged it so that the duller ones were not all put together. But the radio man’s wife, a vivacious beanpole of a woman, dressed in plumes and jet accessories like a film vamp, seemed perfectly content with her company; she was a graduate of the University of Idaho, Class of ’28, who loved, she said, a good hen fest. She had known Harald from a boy, she announced, and his old folks too, though long time no see. Anders, Harald’s father, had been the principal of the high school in Boise she and Harald had gone to, way back when. “Isn’t Kay a honey?” she at once demanded of Dottie. “Awfully nice,” said Dottie, warmly. Her neighbor was the sort that used to be called “peppy”; on the whole, Dottie agreed with the English teacher who said that it was wiser not to use slang because it dated you so quickly. “How come her parents didn’t show?” the woman continued, lowering her voice. “‘Show’?” repeated Dottie, at a loss—could she mean show dogs or cats? “Turn up for the wedding.” “Oh,” said Dottie, coughing. “I believe they sent Kay and Harald a check,” she murmured. “Rather than make the trip, you know.” The woman nodded. “That’s what Dave said—my husband. He figured they must have sent a check.” “So much more useful,” said Dottie. “Don’t you agree?” “Oh, sure,” said the woman. “I’m kind of an old softy, myself. I was married in a veil. …You know, I told Harald I’d have liked to give the wedding at my place. We could have scrounged up a minister and Dave could have taken some pictures, to send to the folks back home. But Kay had made all the arrangements, it seemed, by the time I got my bid in.” She stopped on a rising note and looked inquiringly at Dottie, who felt herself in deep waters. Kay’s plans, she said tactfully, turning it into a joke, were “as the laws of the Medes and the Persians”; nobody could change her. “Who was it said,” she added, twinkling, “that his wife had a whim of iron? My father always quotes that when he has to give in to Mother.” “Cute,” said her neighbor. “Harald’s a swell gent,” she went on, in a different voice, more thoughtful and serious. “Kind of a vulnerable gent, too. Though you might not think so.” She looked hard at Dottie and her plumes nodded belligerently as she downed a glass of punch.

  Across the table, farther down, on Kay’s left, the auburn-haired descendant of Hawthorne, who was talking to Priss Hartshorn, caught Dottie’s troubled eye and winked. Not knowing what else to do, Dottie gamely winked back. She had not imagined she was the type men winked at. The oldest of the group, nearly twenty-three now, thanks to the poor health that had kept her out of school as a child, she knew she was a bit of an old maid; the group teased her for her decorum and staid habits and mufflers and medicines and the long mink coat she wore on campus to keep off the cold, but she had a good sense of humor and quietly joined in the laugh. Her beaux had always treated her with respect; she was the sort of girl that people’s brothers took out and she had a whole string of pale young men who were studying archaeology or musicology or architecture in the Harvard Graduate School; she read out bits of their letters to the group—descriptions of concerts or of digs in the Southwest—and, playing Truth, admitted to having had two proposals. She had fine eyes, everyone told her, and a nice flashing set of white teeth and a pretty, if thin, cap of hair; her nose was rather long, in the pointed New England way, and her brows were black and a little heavy; she resembled the Copley portrait of an ancestress that hung in the family hall. In a modest way, she was fun-loving and even, she suspected, rather sensuous; she loved dancing and harmonizing and was always crooning to herself snatches of popular songs. Yet nobody had ever tried to take a liberty with her; some of the girls found it hard to believe this, but it was true. And the strange thing was, she would not have been shocked. The girls found the fact funny, but D. H. Lawrence was one of her favorite authors: he had such a true feeling for animals and for the natural side of life.

  She and Mother had talked it over and agreed that if you were in love and engaged to a nice young man you perhaps ought to have relations once to make sure of a happy adjustment. Mother, who was very youthful and modern, knew of some very sad cases within her own circle of friends where the man and the woman just didn’t fit down there and ought never to have been married. Not believing in divorce, Dottie thought it very important to arrange that side of marriage properly; defloration, which the girls w
ere always joking about in the smoking room, frightened her. Kay had had an awful time with Harald; five times, she insisted, before she was penetrated, and this in spite of basketball and a great deal of riding out West. Mother said you could have the hymen removed surgically, if you wanted, as royal families abroad were said to do; but perhaps a very gentle lover could manage to make it painless; hence it might be better to marry an older man, with experience.

  The best man was proposing a toast; looking up, Dottie found Dick Brown’s (that was his name) bright grey eyes on her again. He raised his glass and drank to her, ceremoniously. Dottie drank in return. “Isn’t this fun?” cried Libby MacAusland, arching her long neck and weaving her head about and laughing in her exhausted style. “So much nicer,” purred the voices. “No receiving line, no formality, no older people.” “It’s just what I want for myself,” announced Libby. “A young people’s wedding!” She uttered a blissful scream as a Baked Alaska came in, the meringue faintly smoking. “Baked Alaska!” she cried and fell back, as if in a heap, on her chair. “Girls!” she said solemnly, pointing to the big ice-cream cake with slightly scorched peaks of meringue that was being lowered into position before Kay. “Look at it. Childhood dreams come true! It’s every children’s party in the whole blessed United States. It’s patent-leather slippers and organdy and a shy little boy in an Eton collar asking you to dance. I don’t know when I’ve been so excited. I haven’t seen one since I was twelve years old. It’s Mount Whitney; it’s Fujiyama.” The girls smiled forbearingly at each other; Libby “wrote.” But in fact they had shared her delight until she began talking about it, and a sigh of anticipation went up as they watched the hot meringue slump under Kay’s knife. Standing against the wall, the two waiters watched rather dourly. The dessert was not all that good. The meringue had browned unevenly; it was white in some places and burned black in others, which gave it a disagreeable taste. Underneath the slab of ice cream, the sponge cake was stale and damp. But fealty to Kay sent plates back for seconds. The Baked Alaska was the kind of thing that in Kay’s place the group hoped they would have thought of—terribly original for a wedding and yet just right when you considered it. They were all tremendously interested in cooking and quite out of patience with the unimaginative roasts and chops followed by molds from the caterer that Mother served; they were going to try new combinations and foreign recipes and puffy omelets and soufflés and interesting aspics and just one hot dish in a Pyrex, no soup, and a fresh green salad.

  “It’s a hotel trick,” explained the radio man’s wife, speaking across the table to Priss Hartshorn, who was going to be married herself in September. “They have the ice cream frozen hard as a rock and then, whoosh, into the oven. That way they take no chances, but between you and me it’s not what Mamma used to make.” Priss nodded worriedly; she was a solemn, ashy-haired little girl who looked like a gopher and who felt it her duty to absorb every bit of word-of-mouth information that pertained to consumer problems. Economics had been her major, and she was going to work in the consumer division of N.R.A. “Working conditions,” she declared, with her slight nervous stammer, “in some of our best hotel kitchens are way substandard, you know.” She had begun to feel her liquor; the punch was rather treacherous, even though applejack, being a natural product, was one of the purest things you could drink these days. In her haze, she saw the radio man stand up. “To the Class of Thirty-three,” he toasted. The others drank to the Vassar girls. “Bottoms up!” cried the man’s wife. From the silent best man came a cackling laugh. Tiddly as she was, Priss could tell that she and her friends, through no fault of their own, had awakened economic antagonism. Vassar girls, in general, were not liked, she knew, by the world at large; they had come to be a sort of symbol of superiority. She would have to see a good deal less of some of them after she was married if she wanted Sloan to keep in with his colleagues on the staff of the hospital. She stared sadly at Pokey Prothero, her best friend, who was sitting sprawled out, across the table, putting ashes into her plate of melting ice cream and soggy cake with the very bad table manners that only the very rich could afford. There was a long spill down the front of her beautiful Lavin suit. Mentally, Priss applied Energine; her neat little soul scrubbed away. She did not know how Pokey would ever get along in life without a personal maid to take care of her. Ever since Chapin, she herself had been picking up after Pokey, making her use an ashtray in the smoking room, collecting her laundry and mailing it home for her, creeping into the common bathroom to wash the ring off the tub so that the others would not complain again. Poor Pokey, when she was married, would be doomed to a conventional establishment and a retinue of servants and governesses; she would miss all the fun and the alarums, as Mother called them, of starting on your own from scratch, with just a tweeny to help with the dishwashing and the heavy work.

  Great wealth was a frightful handicap; it insulated you from living. The depression, whatever else you could say about it, had been a truly wonderful thing for the propertied classes; it had waked a lot of them up to the things that really counted. There wasn’t a family Priss knew that wasn’t happier and saner for having to scale down its expenditures; sacrifices had drawn the members together. Look at Polly Andrews’ family: Mr. Andrews had been in Riggs Clinic when the depression hit and all his investments went blotto; whereupon, instead of sinking deeper into melancholia and being put into a state hospital (grim thought!), he had come home and made himself useful as the family cook. He did every bit of the cooking and the marketing and served the most scrumptious meals, having learned about haute cuisine when they had their chateau in France; Mrs. Andrews did the scullery work and the vacuuming; everybody made his own bed; and the children, when they were home, washed up. They were the gayest family to visit, on the little farm they had managed to save near Stockbridge; Lakey went there last Thanksgiving and never had a better time—she only wished, she said, that her father would lose his money, like Mr. Andrews. She meant it quite seriously. Of course, it made a difference that the Andrews had always been rather highbrow; they had inner resources to fall back on.

  Priss herself was a dyed-in-the-wool liberal; it ran in the blood. Her mother was a Vassar trustee, and her grandfather had been reform mayor of New York. Last year, when she had had to be a bridesmaid in a big social wedding at St. James’, with the carpet and the awning and so on, she had not been able to get over the sight of the unemployed crowding round the church entrance, with the police holding them back. It was not that Priss felt she had to change the world singlehanded, as her brother, who went to Yale, was always jeering, and she did not blame the class she was born into for wanting to hold onto its privileges—that was part of their conditioning. She was not in the least bit a socialist or a rebel, though even Sloan liked to tease her about being one. To be a socialist, she thought, was a sort of luxury, when the world itself was changing so fast and there was so much that had to be done here and now. You could not sit down and wait for the millennium, any more than you could turn the clock back. The group used to play the game of when in history you would like to have lived if you could choose, and Priss was the only one who stuck up for the present; Kay picked the year 2000 (A.D., of course) and Lakey was for the quattrocento—which showed, incidentally, what a varied group they were. But seriously Priss could not imagine a more exciting time to come of age in than right now in America, and she felt awfully sorry for a person like Dick Brown, on her right, with his restless, bitter face and white unsteady hands; having talked with him quite a while (probably boring him stiff!), she could see that he was typical of that earlier generation of expatriates and bohemian rebels they had been studying about in Miss Lockwood’s course who were coming back now to try to find their roots again.

  The gabble of voices slowly died down. The girls, confused by alcohol, cast inquiring looks at each other. What was to happen now? At an ordinary wedding, Kay and Harald would slip off to change to traveling costume, and Kay would throw her bouquet. But there was to be no
honeymoon, they recalled. Kay and Harald, evidently, had nowhere to go but back to the sublet apartment they had just left this morning. Probably, if the group knew Kay, the bed was not even made. The funny, uneasy feeling that had come over them all in the chapel affected them again. They looked at their watches; it was only one-fifteen. How many hours till it was time for Harald to go to work? Doubtless, lots of couples got married and just went home again, but somehow it did not seem right to let that happen. “Should I ask them to Aunt Julia’s for coffee?” whispered Polly Andrews to Dottie, across the table. “It makes rather a lot,” murmured Dottie. “I don’t know what Ross would say.” Ross was Aunt Julia’s maid and quite a character. “Bother Ross!” said Polly. The two girls’ eyes went up and down the table, counting, and then met, grave and startled. There were thirteen—eight of the group and five outsiders. How like Kay! Or was it an accident? Had someone dropped out at the last minute? Meanwhile, the radio man’s wife had been exchanging signals with her husband; she turned to Dottie and spoke sotto voce. “How would some of you gals like to drop around to my place for some Java? I’ll give Kay and Harald the high sign.” Dottie hesitated; perhaps this would really be more suitable, but she did not like to decide for Kay, who might prefer Aunt Julia’s. A sense that everything was getting too involved, wheels within wheels, depressed her.