The Group

by Mary McCarthy

  Three

  “GET YOURSELF A PESSARY.” Dick’s muttered envoi, as he propelled her firmly to the door the next morning, fell on Dottie’s ears with the effect of a stunning blow. Bewildered, she understood him to be saying “Get yourself a peccary,” and a vision of a coarse piglike mammal they had studied in Zoology passed across her dazed consciousness, like a slide on a screen, followed by awful memories of Krafft-Ebing and the girl who had kept a goat at Vassar. Was this some variant she ought to know about, probably, of the old-maid joke? Tears dampened her eyes, though she tried to wink them back. Evidently, Dick hated her for what had taken place between them in the night; some men were like that, Kay said, after they had yielded to their passions: “an expense of spirit in a waste of shame.” They had had the most dismal breakfast, which he had fixed, not letting her help him, on a grill in the clothes closet—scrambled eggs and coffee and the remains of a coffee ring from the bakery; no fruit or fruit juice. While they ate, he had hardly spoken; he had passed her the first section of the paper and then sat there, with his coffee, reading the sports news and the classified ads. When she had tried to give him the news section, he had impatiently pushed it back to her. Yet up to this very moment she had been telling herself that he might have just got up “on the wrong side of the bed,” as Mother said; Daddy was cross too, sometimes, in the morning. Now she saw, though, that there was no use pretending any more; she had lost him. In his dressing gown, with his hair disordered and his cruel biting smile and bitter taunts, he reminded her of someone. Hamlet—of course—putting Ophelia away from him. “Get thee to a nunnery.” “I loved you not.” But she could not say, like Ophelia, “I was the more deceived” (which was the most pathetic moment in the whole play, the class had decided), because Dick had not deceived her; it was she who had been fooling herself. She stared at him, swallowing hard; a tear slid out of one eye. “A female contraceptive, a plug,” Dick threw out impatiently. “You get it from a lady doctor. Ask your friend Kay.”

  Understanding dawned; her heart did a handspring. In a person like Dick, her feminine instinct caroled, this was surely the language of love. But it was a mistake to show a man that you had been unsure of him even for a second. “Yes, Dick,” she whispered, her hand twisting the doorknob, while she let her eyes tell him softly what a deep, reverent moment this was, a sort of pledge between them. Luckily, he could never imagine the thing she had been thinking about the peccary! The happiness in her face caused him to raise an eyebrow and frown. “I don’t love you, you know, Boston,” he said warningly. “Yes, Dick,” she replied. “And you must promise me you won’t fall in love with me.” “Yes, Dick,” she repeated, more faintly. “My wife says I’m a bastard, but she still likes me in the hay. You’ll have to accept that. If you want that, you can have it.” “I want it, Dick,” said Dottie in a feeble but staunch voice. Dick shrugged. “I don’t believe you, Boston. But we can give it a try.” A meditative smile appeared on his lips. “Most women don’t take me seriously when I state my terms. Then they get hurt. In the back of their heads, they have a plan to make me fall in love with them. I don’t fall in love.” Dottie’s warm eyes were teasing. “What about Betty?” He cocked his head at the photograph. “You think I love her?” Dottie nodded. He looked very serious. “I’ll tell you,” he said. “I like Betty better than I’ve liked any woman. I’ve still got hot pants for her, if you want to call that love.” Dottie lowered her eyes and shook her head. “But I won’t change my life for her, and so Betty lit out. I don’t blame her; I’d have done the same if I were made like Betty. Betty is all woman. She likes money, change, excitement, things, clothes, possessions.” He rubbed his strong jaw line with a thumb, as though he were studying a puzzle. “I hate possessions. It’s a funny thing, because you’d think I hated them because they meant stability, wouldn’t you?” Dottie nodded. “But I like stability; that’s just the rub!” He had become quite tense and excited; his hands flexed nervously as he spoke. To Dottie’s eyes, he suddenly appeared boyish, like the worried young lifeguards in their drifting boats at Cape Ann who sometimes dropped in at the cottage to discuss their futures with Mother. But of course that was what he must have been, once, growing up in Marblehead in the middle of the summer people; he was built like a swimmer, and she could picture him, brooding, in the lifesaving boat in one of those red jackets they wore—Mother said those boys were often marked for life by the experience of being betwixt and between, with the summer people but not of them.

  “I like a man’s life,” he said. “A bar. The outdoors. Fishing and hunting. I like men’s talk, that’s never driving to get anywhere but just circles and circles. That’s why I drink. Paris suited me—the crowd of painters and newspapermen and photographers. I’m a natural exile; if I have a few dollars or francs, I’m satisfied. I’ll never pass third base as a painter, but I can draw and do nice clean work—an honest job. But I hate change, Boston, and I don’t change myself. That’s where I come a cropper with women. Women expect an affair to get better and better, and if it doesn’t they think it’s getting worse. They think if I sleep with them longer I’m going to get fonder of them, and if I don’t get fonder that I’m tiring of them. But for me it’s all the same. If I like it the first time, I know I’m going to keep on liking it. I liked you last night and I’ll keep on liking you as long as you want to come here. But don’t harbor the idea that I’m going to like you more.” A truculent, threatening note had come into his voice with the last words; he stood, staring down at her harshly and teetering a little on his slippered feet. Dottie fingered the frayed tassel of his dressing-gown sash. “All right, Dick,” she whispered.

  “When you get yourself fixed up, you can bring your things here and I’ll keep them for you. Just give me a call after you’ve been to the doctor.” A breath of last night’s liquor wafted into her face; she fell back a step and averted her head. She had been hoping to know Dick better, but now, all at once, his strange philosophy of life gave her a sinking feeling. How could she fit him in this summer, for instance? He did not seem to realize that she would have to go up to Gloucester, the way she always did. If they were engaged, he could come up to visit, but of course they weren’t and never could be; that was what he was telling her. To her horror, now that he had said he wanted her on his terms, Dottie found herself having second thoughts: what if she had lost her virginity with a man who scared her and who sounded, from his own description, like a pretty bad hat? For a moment, Dottie felt cornered, but her training had instilled the principle that it was a mark of low breeding to consider that you might have been wrong in a person. “I can’t take you out,” he said more gently, as if he read her thoughts. “I can only ask you to come here whenever you’re in town. The welcome mat will be out. I’ve nothing but my bed to offer you. I don’t go to theatres or night clubs and very seldom to restaurants.” Dottie opened her mouth, but Dick shook his head. “I don’t like ladies who want to pay my check. What I make with my posters and commissions take care of my simple wants: my carfare, my bar bill, and a few frugal canned goods.” Dottie’s clasped hands made a gesture of pity and remorse; she had been forgetting he was poor, which was why, of course, he was so short and gruff about seeing her—it was his pride that made him talk that way. “Don’t worry,” he reassured her. “There’s an aunt up in Marblehead who comes through with a check now and then. Some day, if I live long enough, I’ll be her heir. But I hate possessions, Boston—forgive me if I think of you generically. I hate the itch to acquire. I don’t care for this kinetic society.” Dottie felt the time had come to interpose a gentle remonstrance; she thought Dick’s aunt would not altogether approve of his point of view. “But Dick,” she said quietly, “there are false possessions and true possessions. If everybody thought like you, the human race would never have got anywhere. We’d still be living in caves. Why, the wheel wouldn’t even have been invented! People need an incentive, maybe not a money incentive …” Dick laughed. “You must be the fiftieth woman who has
said that to me. It’s a credit to universal education that whenever a girl meets Dick Brown she begins to talk about the wheel and the lever. I’ve even had a French prostitute tell me about the fulcrum.” “Good-bye, Dick,” Dottie said quickly. “I mustn’t keep you from your work.” “Aren’t you going to take the phone number?” he demanded, shaking his head in mock reproach. She handed him her little blue leather address book, and he wrote down his name and his landlady’s telephone number in heavy drawing pencil with a flourish; he had very striking handwriting. “Good-bye, Boston.” He took her long chin between his thumb and forefinger and waggled it back and forth, absently. “Remember: no monkey business; no falling in love. Honor bright.”

  Notwithstanding this agreement, Dottie’s heart was humming happily as she sat, three days later, beside Kay Petersen, in the woman doctor’s office suite. Actions spoke louder than words, and whatever Dick might say, the fact remained that he had sent her here, to be wedded, as it were, by proxy, with the “ring” or diaphragm pessary that the woman doctor dispensed. With her hair freshly waved and her complexion glowing from a facial, she wore a look of quiet assurance, the look of a contented matron, almost like Mother and her friends. Knowledge was responsible for her composure. Kay would hardly believe it, but Dottie, all by herself, had visited a birth-control bureau and received a doctor’s name and a sheaf of pamphlets that described a myriad of devices—tampons, sponges, collar-button, wishbone, and butterfly pessaries, thimbles, silk rings, and coils—and the virtues and drawbacks of each. The new device recommended to Dottie by the bureau had the backing of the whole U.S. medical profession; it had been found by Margaret Sanger in Holland and was now for the first time being imported in quantity into the U.S.A., where our own manufacturers could copy it. It combined the maximum of protection with the minimum of inconvenience and could be used by any woman of average or better intelligence, following the instructions of a qualified physician.

  This article, a rubber cap mounted on a coiled spring, came in a ranges of sizes and would be tried out in Dottie’s vagina, for fit, wearing comfort, and so on, in the same way that various lenses were tried out for the eyes. The woman doctor would insert it, and having made sure of the proper size, she would teach Dottie how to put it in, how to smear it with contraceptive jelly and put a dab in the middle, how to crouch in a squatting position, fold the pessary between thumb and forefinger of the right hand, while parting the labia majora with the left hand, and edge the pessary in, so that it would snap into place, shielding the cervix, and finally how to follow it with the right middle finger, locate the cervix or soft neck of the uterus and make certain it was covered by the rubber. When this process had been rehearsed several times, to the watching doctor’s satisfaction, Dottie would be taught how and when to douche, how much water to use, the proper height for the douche bag, and how to hold the labia firmly around the lubricated nozzle in order to get the best results. As she was leaving the office, the nurse would present her with a Manila envelope containing a tube of vaginal jelly and a small flat box with Dottie’s personalized contraceptive in it. The nurse would instruct her how to care for the pessary: to wash it after each use, dry it carefully, and dust it with talcum before returning it to its box.

  Kay and Harald had just about fainted when they heard what Dottie had been up to, behind their back. She came to see them in their apartment, bringing a Georgian silver creamer for a wedding present, just the sort of thing an old aunt would have inflicted on you, and a bunch of white peonies; Kay could not have been more disappointed when she thought that for the same money they could have had something plain and modern from Jensen’s Danish shop. Then, when Harald went to the kitchen to start their supper (minced sea clams, the new canned kind, on toast), Dottie had quietly told Kay, who wanted to know what she had been doing, that she had taken Dick Brown for her lover. Coming from Dottie, that imperial phrase was simply perfect; Kay immediately saved it to tell Harald. It had happened only the night before, it seemed, in that studio room of Dick’s, and already, today, Dottie had scurried around to the birth-control bureau and got all this literature, which she had with her in her pocketbook. Kay did not know what to say, but her face must have shown how appalled she was. She thought Dottie must be insane. Underneath that virile mask, which was what Harald called it, Dick Brown was a very warped personality, a dipsomaniac and a violent misogynist, with a terrible inferiority complex because of what had happened with his socialite wife. His motives were plain enough; he was using Dottie to pay back society for the wound it had inflicted on his ego—Kay could hardly wait till she could hear how Harald would analyze it, when they were alone. But in spite of her impatience, she asked Dottie to stay for supper with them, greatly to Harald’s surprise, when he came in with the tray of drinks: after Harald had gone to the theatre, Dottie would be bound to tell more. “I had to ask her,” she apologized to Harald, in a quick exchange in the kitchen. She put her lips to his ear. “An awful thing has happened, and we’re responsible! Dick Brown has seduced her.”

  Yet every time she looked at Dottie, sitting in their living room, so serene and conventional in her pearls and dressmaker suit, with white touches, and smart navy-blue sailor, sipping her Clover Club cocktail out of the Russel Wright cup and wiping a mustache of egg white from her long upper lip with a cocktail napkin, she just could not picture her in bed with a man. Afterward, Harald said that she seemed quite an appetizing piece, in her chipmunk style, with her brown friendly eyes gleaming with quiet fun and her lashes aflutter whenever she looked at him. What he did not see was that a lot of it was clothes, for, thanks to a clever mother, Dottie dressed to perfection: she was the only one of the Boston contingent at Vassar who knew better than to wear tweeds and plaid mufflers, which made the poor things look like gaunt, elderly governesses out for a Sunday hike. But, according to Harald, her deep-bosomed figure, as revealed by her bias-cut blouse, gave promise of sensuality. Probably it meant something, Kay could not deny it, that it was Dick himself, on his own initiative, it seemed, who had told her to go and get fitted with a pessary!

  “He said to consult me?” Kay repeated, wondering and somewhat flattered, after Harald had gone and they were washing the dishes. She had always thought Dick did not like her. The fact was that, though she knew about pessaries, she herself did not possess one. She had always used suppositories with Harald, and it embarrassed her a little now to have to confess this to Dottie, who seemed to have forged ahead of her so surprisingly and after only one night. …She envied Dottie’s enterprise in going to the birth-control bureau; until she was married, she herself would never have had the nerve. Dottie wanted to know whether Kay thought it was a good sign, Dick’s saying that to her, and Kay had to admit that on the surface it was; it could only mean that Dick was expecting to sleep with her regularly, if you thought that was good. Examining her own emotions, Kay found she was piqued; it nettled her to guess that Dottie might have been better than she was in bed. Still, truth compelled her to tell Dottie that if it were only a halfhearted affair, Dick would just use condoms (the way Harald had at first) or practice coitus interruptus. “He must like you, Renfrew,” she declared, shaking out the dish mop. “Or like you enough anyway.”

  That was Harald’s verdict too. Riding on the top of a Fifth Avenue bus, on the way to the doctor’s office, Kay repeated to Dottie what Harald had said of the etiquette of contraception, which, as he explained it, was like any other etiquette—the code of manners rising out of social realities. You had to look at it in terms of economics. No man of honor (which Dick, in Harald’s opinion, was) would expect a girl to put up the doctor’s fee, plus the price of the pessary and the jelly and the douche bag unless he planned to sleep with her long enough for her to recover her investment. Of that, Dottie could rest assured. A man out for a casual affair found it simpler to buy Trojans by the dozen, even though it decreased his own pleasure; that way, he was not tied to the girl. The lower classes, for instance, almost never transferred the burd
en of contraception to the woman; this was a discovery of the middle class. A workingman was either indifferent to the danger of conception or he mistrusted the girl too much to leave the matter in her hands.

  This mistrust, Harald said, which was deep in the male nature, made even middle-class and professional men wary of sending a girl for a pessary; too many shotgun weddings had resulted from a man’s relying on a woman’s assurance that the contraceptive was in. Then there was the problem of the apparatus. The unmarried girl who lived with her family required a place to keep her pessary and her douche bag where her mother was not likely to find them while doing out the bureau drawers. This meant that the man, unless he was married, had to keep them for her, in his bureau drawer or his bathroom. The custodianship of these articles (Harald was so entertaining in his slow-spoken, careful, dry way) assumed the character of a sacred trust. If their guardian was a man of any delicacy, they precluded the visits of other women to the apartment, who might open drawers or rummage in the medicine cabinet or even feel themselves entitled to use the douche bag hallowed to “Her.”

  With a married woman, if the affair were serious, the situation was the same: she brought a second pessary and a douche bag, which she kept in her lover’s apartment, where they exercised a restraining influence if he felt tempted to betray her. A man entrusted with this important equipment was bonded, so to speak, Harald said, like a bank employee; when he did stray with another woman, he was likely to do it in her place or in a hotel room or even a taxi—some spot not consecrated by the sacral reminders. In the same way, a married woman pledged her devotion by committing her second pessary to her lover’s care; only a married woman of very coarse fiber would use the same pessary for both husband and lover. So long as the lover had charge of the pessary, like a medieval knight with the key to his lady’s chastity belt, he could feel that she was true to him. Though this could be a mistake. One adventurous wife Harald described was said to have pessaries all over town, like a sailor with a wife in every port, while her husband, a busy stage director, assured himself of her good behavior by a daily inspection of the little box in her medicine cabinet, where the conjugal pessary lay in its dusting of talcum powder.