The Group

by Mary McCarthy

  “Harald has made quite a study of it, hasn’t he?” commented Dottie with a demure twinkle. “I’m spoiling it,” replied Kay seriously. “The way Harald tells it, you can see the whole thing in terms of property values. The fetishism of property. I told him he ought to write it up for Esquire; they publish some quite good things. Don’t you think he should?” Dottie did not know what to answer; Harald’s approach, she felt, was rather “unpleasant,” so cold and cerebral, though perhaps he knew what he was talking about. It was certainly a different angle from what you got in the birth-control pamphlets.

  Furthermore, Kay quoted, the disposal of the pessary and the douche bag presented a problem when a love affair was breaking up. What was the man to do with these “hygienic relics” after he or the woman tired? They could not be returned through the mail, like love letters or an engagement ring, though crude lads, Harald said, had been known to do this; on the other hand, they could not be put in the trash basket for the janitor or the landlady to find; they would not burn in the fireplace without giving off an awful smell, and to keep them for another woman, given our bourgeois prejudices, was unthinkable. A man could carry them, stuffed into a paper bag, to one of the city’s wastebaskets late at night or dump them into the river, but friends of Harald’s who had done this had actually been halted by the police. Probably because they acted so furtive. Trying to get rid of a woman’s pessary and fountain syringe, the corpus delicti of a love affair, was exactly, as Harald put it, like trying to get rid of a body. “I said, you could do the way murderers do in detective stories: check them into the Grand Central parcel room and then throw away the check.” Kay gave her rollicking laugh, but Dottie shivered. She saw that it would not be funny if the problem came up for her and Dick; every time she thought of the future, of the terrible complications a secret affair got you into, she almost wanted to give up and go home. And all Kay’s conversation, though doubtless well meant, seemed calculated to dismay her with its offhand boldness and cynicism.

  The upshot, continued Kay, was that no bachelor in his right mind would send a girl to the doctor to be fitted if he did not feel pretty serious about her. The difficulties only arose, of course, with respectable married women or nice girls who lived with their parents or with other girls. There were women of the looser sort, divorcées and unattached secretaries and office workers living in their own apartments, who equipped themselves independently and kept their douche bags hanging on the back of their bathroom door for anybody to see who wandered in to pee during a cocktail party. One friend of Harald’s, a veteran stage manager, always made it a point to look over a girl’s bathroom before starting anything; if the bag was on the door, it was nine to one he would make her on the first try.

  They descended from the bus on lower Fifth Avenue; Dottie’s complexion had come out in blotches like hives or shingles—a sure sign that she was nervous. Kay was sympathetic. This was a big step for Dottie; she had been trying to give Dottie an inkling of just how big a step it was, much more than losing your virginity. For a married woman, naturally, it was different; Harald had agreed immediately that it would be a good idea for her to make an appointment and go along with Dottie to be fitted too. She and Harald both loathed children and had no intention of having any; Kay had seen in her own family how offspring could take the joy out of marriage. Her tribe of brothers and sisters had kept her Dads’ nose to the grindstone; if he had not had so many children, he might have been a famous specialist, instead of a hard-worked G.P. with only a wing in the hospital to commemorate the work he had done in orthopedics and on serums for meningitis. Poor Dads had quite a kick out of sending her east to Vassar; she was the oldest and the brightest, and she had the feeling that he wanted her to have the life he might have had himself, out in the big world, where he would have got the homage he deserved. He still had invitations to come and do research in the big eastern laboratories, but now he was too old to learn, he said; the cerebral arteries were hardening. He had just crashed through nobly with a check; she and Harald had been moved almost to tears by the size of it—far more than he and Mums would have spent on trains and hotels if they had come on for the wedding. It was a declaration of faith, said Harald. And she and Harald did not intend to betray that faith by breeding children, when Harald had his name to make in the theatre. The theatre—strange coincidence!—was one of Dads’ big passions; he and Mums went to see all the touring companies in Salt Lake City and had tickets every night, nearly, when they came to New York for medical meetings. Not leg shows, either; Dads’ favorite playwright, after Shakespeare, was Bernard Shaw. Harald thought it would be a nice idea for Kay to keep the programs of the worthwhile plays he and she saw and send them on to Dads; that way, he would feel in touch.

  Dads, like all modern doctors, believed in birth control and was for sterilizing criminals and the unfit. He would certainly approve of what Kay was doing. What he would think about Dottie was another question. Kay herself had been horrified to hear that Dottie had made the appointment in her real name: “Dorothy Renfrew,” not even “Mrs.” As though she were living in Russia or Sweden, instead of the old U.S.A. A lot of people who would not be shocked at her for sleeping with Dick (that could happen to anybody) would look at her askance if they could see what she was up to this minute. The things you did in private were your own business, but this was practically public! Kay ran an apprehensive eye up and down Fifth Avenue; you could never tell who might be watching them from a passing bus or a taxi. She had begun to be nervous herself, on Dottie’s behalf, and to be crosser and crosser with Dick. Harald would never have exposed her to an ordeal like this. After the first few times, he had gone to the drugstore himself and bought her suppositories and a bulb type of douche and Zonite, so that she would not have to face the druggist herself. Kay gripped Dottie’s arm, to steady her as they crossed the street with the traffic light; she rued the day she had invited Dick to her wedding, knowing what he was. Why, the office might be raided and the doctor’s records impounded and published in the papers, which would kill Dottie’s family, who would probably turn around and blame Kay, as the pathfinder of the college group. She felt she was making quite a sacrifice in coming with Dottie today, to lend moral support, though Dottie insisted that birth control was perfectly legal and above-board, thanks to a court decision that allowed doctors to prescribe contraceptives for the prevention or cure of disease. As they rang the doctor’s bell Kay had to laugh, suddenly, at Dottie’s expression: you could almost see Mrs. Pankhurst in her resolute eye.

  And indeed Dottie’s zealotry was reflected in the furnishings of the woman doctor’s office, which had a sort of militant plainness, like the headquarters of a missionary sect. There was a single upholstered couch, with two antimacassars aligned on its back; against the tan walls was a series of straight chairs. The magazine rack held copies of Hygeia, Parents, Consumers’ Research Bulletin, a current issue of the Nation, and a back number of Harper’s. On the walls were etchings showing overcrowded slums teeming with rickety children and a lithograph of an early hospital ward in which untended young women, with babies at their side, were dying—of puerperal fever, Dottie whispered. There was a pious hush in the atmosphere which was emphasized by the absence of any smoking equipment and by the solemn whirring of a fan. Kay and Dottie, who had automatically taken cigarettes out of their cases, replaced them after a survey of the room. There were two other patients waiting, reading Hygeia and Consumers’ Research Bulletin. One, a sallow thin woman of about thirty, with a pair of cotton gloves on her lap, wore no wedding ring, a fact which Dottie silently called to Kay’s attention. The second patient, in rimless glasses and worn Oxfords, was almost middle-aged. The sight of these two women, far from well-to-do, and of the prints on the walls had a sobering effect on the girls. Kay, made to reflect on “how much good the doctor was doing,” a thing often said of her father by the elite of Salt Lake City, felt ashamed of the brittle, smart way she had talked about birth control on the bus, though she had o
nly been quoting Harald. “Extend your antennae, girls,” was a favorite apothegm of the teacher she had respected most, and Kay, reminded of her father’s nonpaying patients, saw, to her discomfiture, that she and Dottie were just the frills on the doctor’s practice.

  What she could not remember, though Harald kept drilling it into her, was that she and her friends did not count any more, except as individuals, in the wider picture of American society, exemplified by these two women, right here in this office. Last night, after the theatre, when the three of them had gone to have a beer in a speak-easy, Harald had been explaining just that to Dottie. The transfer of financial power, he showed, from Threadneedle Street to Wall Street was an event in world history comparable to the defeat of the Spanish Armada, which had ushered in the era of capitalism. When Roosevelt, just now, had gone off the gold standard, it was a declaration of independence from Europe and an announcement of a new, flexible epoch. The N.R.A. and the eagle were symbols of the arrival of a new class to power. Their class, the upper middle, he told the two girls, was finished politically and economically; its best elements would merge with the rising class of workers and farmers and technicians, of which he, as a stage technician, was one. Take the theatre as an example. In the days of Belasco, the director used to be king; today, the director was dependent, first of all on his backers, who might be a combine, and second, and even more important, on his master electrician, who could make or break a play by the way he handled the lighting—behind every name director, like Jed Harris, for instance, there was a genius electrician, just as there was a genius camera-man behind every name movie director. The same in radio; it was the engineers, the men in the control room, who really counted. A doctor today was dependent on his technicians, on the men in the lab and the X-ray room. “They’re the boys who can make or break a diagnosis.”

  Last night, it had thrilled Kay to imagine the future he predicted, of mass abundance through the machine. She had enjoyed watching him impress Dottie, who had not suspected he was such a social thinker since he did not put that side of himself in his letters. “As individuals,” he said, “you girls have something to pass on to individuals in the rising class, just as old Europe still has something to pass on to America.” It relieved her to hear him say this, with his arm clasping her waist and Dottie looking on, wide-eyed, for Kay did not want to be left behind by history and at the same time she was not really strong for the idea of equality; she liked, she had to confess, to be superior. Harald, when he was in a good mood, as he was last night, seemed to think this would still be possible, though with a difference, in the new age.

  Last night, he had explained technocracy to Dottie, to show her there was nothing to fear from the future, if it was managed with scientific intelligence. In an economy of plenty and leisure, which the machine had already made feasible, everybody would only have to work a few hours a day. It was through such an economy that his class, the class of artists and technicians, would come naturally to the top; the homage people paid to money today would be paid in the future to the engineers and contrivers of leisure-time activities. More leisure meant more time for art and culture. Dottie wanted to know what would happen to the capitalists (her father was in the import business), and Kay looked inquiringly at Harald. “Capital will blend into government,” said Harald. “After a brief struggle. That’s what we’re witnessing now. The administrator, who’s just a big-scale technician, will replace the big capitalist in industry. Individual ownership is becoming obsolete; the administrators are running the show.” “Take Robert Moses,” put in Kay. “He’s transforming the whole face of New York with his wonderful new parkways and playgrounds.” And she urged Dottie to go to Jones Beach, which was an inspiring example, she really felt this herself, of planning on a large scale for leisure. “Everybody from Oyster Bay,” she added, “drives over there now to swim. It’s quite the thing to do, instead of swimming at a club.” Private enterprise, suggested Harald, still had a part to play, if it had breadth of vision. Radio City, where he had worked for a while as a stage manager’s assistant, was an example of civic planning, undertaken by enlightened capitalists, the Rockefellers. Kay brought in the Modern Museum, which had Rockefeller backing too. New York, she honestly thought, was experiencing a new Renaissance, with the new Medicis competing with public ownership to create a modern Florence. You could see it even in Macy’s, agreed Harald, where enlightened merchant-Jews, the Strauses, were training a corps of upper-middle-class technicians, like Kay, to make the store into something more than a business, something closer to a civic center or permanent fairgrounds, with educational exhibits, like the old Crystal Palace. Then Kay talked about the smart new renovated tenements in the Fifties and Eighties, along the East River, black with white trim and white Venetian blinds; they were still another example of intelligent planning by capital! Vincent Astor had done them. Of course, the rents were rather high, but look what you got: views of the river just as good as from Sutton Place mansions, sometimes a garden, the Venetian blinds, like the old jalousies but modernized, and completely up-to-date kitchens. When you thought that they had just been eyesores, probably full of vermin and unsanitary hall toilets, till the Astor interests fixed them up! And other landlords were following their example, turning old blocks of barracky tenements into compact apartment buildings four and five stories high, with central courts planted with grass and shrubs and two- and three-room apartments for young people—some with fireplaces and built-in bookcases and all with brand-new plumbing and stove and refrigerator. A lot of waste space was being eliminated in these buildings—no more foyers or dining rooms, which were obsolete conventions. Harald, Kay explained, was a perfect fanatic about waste space. A house, he thought, should be a machine for living. When they found a permanent apartment, they were going to have everything built in: bookcases, bureaus, chests. The beds were going to be mattresses and springs, supported by four low pegs, and they were thinking about having a table to eat on that would fold up into the wall like a Murphy bed—a single leaf of wood shaped like an ironing board but broader.

  Kay had seldom been happier than she was just then, outlining these plans to Dottie, while Harald listened with one quizzically raised eyebrow, correcting her whenever she made a mistake. It was Dottie who slightly spoiled things by asking, in those gently rumbling tones, what happened to the poor people who had lived in those tenements before. Where did they go? This was a question Kay had never thought to ask herself, and Harald did not know the answer, which at once put him in a darker mood. “Cui bono?” he said. “‘Who profits?’ Eh?” And he signaled the waiter for another round of beer. This alarmed Kay, who knew he had an understudy rehearsal at ten in the morning. “Your question is at once simple and profound,” he went on, to Dottie. “‘What happens to the poor?’” He stared gloomily ahead of him, as if into empty space. “Do they go to Mr. Moses’ big clean white antiseptic beach that Kay finds so inspiring and ‘civic-minded’? No; they don’t, my girls; they lack the price of admission and the car to transport them. Instead, it becomes the perquisite of the Oyster Bay set—damnable profiteers and grabbers, with their pretty powdered noses sniffing at the public trough.” Kay saw that he was sinking into a Slough of Despond (they had coined this name for his sudden, Scandinavian fits of bitter depression), but she managed to steer the conversation into safer channels by getting him to talk to Dottie about recipes and cooking, one of his favorite themes, so that they were home and in bed by one-thirty. Harald was very paradoxical; he would whirl around and attack the very things he believed in most. As she sat in the doctor’s waiting room and covertly examined the other patients, she could easily imagine him saying that she and Dottie were “profiteering” on the birth-control crusade, whose real aim was to limit the families of the poor. Mentally, she began to defend herself. Birth control, she argued, was for those who knew how to use it and value it—the educated classes. Just like those renovated tenements; if poor people were allowed to move into them, they would wrec
k them right away, through lack of education.

  Dottie’s thoughts too were running on the night before. She was fascinated by the way Kay and Harald had their whole life planned. When Kay started at Macy’s in September, Harald would get their breakfast every morning and then sweep and clean and do the marketing, so that everything would be ready for Kay to get the dinner when she came home from work; over the weekend, they would map out the meals for the week. Right now, Harald was teaching her to cook. His specialties were Italian spaghetti, which any beginner could learn, and those minced sea clams—terribly good—they had the other night, and meat balls cooked in salt in a hot skillet (no fat), and a quick-and-easy meat loaf his mother had taught him: one part beef, one part pork, one part veal; add sliced onions, pour over it a can of Campbell’s tomato soup and bake in the oven. Then there was his chile con carne, made with canned kidney beans and tomato soup again and onions and half a pound of hamburger; you served it over rice, and it stretched for six people. That was his mother’s too. Kay, not to be outdone—she said, laughing—had written her mother for some of the family recipes, the cheaper ones: veal kidneys done with cooking sherry and mushrooms, and a marvelous jellied salad called Green Goddess, made with lime gelatin, shrimps, mayonnaise, and alligator pear, which could be fixed the night before in ramekins and then unmolded on lettuce cups. Kay had found a new cookbook that had a whole section on casserole dishes and another on foreign recipes—so much more adventurous than Fannie Farmer and that old Boston Cooking School. On Sundays, they planned to entertain, either at a late breakfast of chipped beef or corned-beef hash or at a casserole supper. The trouble with American cooking, Harald said, was the dearth of imagination in it and the terrible fear of innards and garlic. He put garlic in everything and was accounted quite a cook. What made a dish, Kay said, was the seasonings. “Listen to how Harald fixes chipped beef. He puts in mustard and Worcestershire sauce and grated cheese—is that right?—and green pepper and an egg; you’d never think it bore any relation to that old milky chipped beef we got at college.” Her happy laugh rang out in the speakeasy. If Dottie wanted to learn, she should study the recipes in the Tribune. “I love the Tribune,” she said. “Harald converted me from the Times.” “The Tribune’s typography has it all over the Times’s,” observed Harald. “How lucky you are, Kay,” Dottie said warmly, “to have found a husband who’s interested in cooking and who’s not afraid of experiment. Most men, you know, have awfully set tastes. Like Daddy, who won’t hear of ‘made’ dishes, except the good old beans on Saturday.” There was a twinkle in her eye, but she really did mean it that Kay was awfully lucky. Kay leaned forward. “You ought to get your cook to try the new way of fixing canned beans. You just add catsup and mustard and Worcestershire sauce and sprinkle them with plenty of brown sugar, cover them with bacon, and put them in the oven in a Pyrex dish.” “It sounds terribly good,” said Dottie, “but Daddy would die.” Harald nodded. He began to talk, very learnedly, about the prejudice that existed in conservative circles against canned goods; it went back, he said, to an old fear of poisoning that derived from home canning, where spoilage was common. Modern machinery and factory processes, of course, had eliminated all danger of bacteria, and yet the prejudice lingered, which was a pity since many canned products, like vegetables picked at their peak and some of the Campbell soups, were better than anything the home cook could achieve. “Have you tasted the new Corn Niblets?” asked Kay. Dottie shook her head. “You ought to tell your mother about them. It’s the whole-kernel corn. Delicious. Almost like corn on the cob. Harald discovered them.” She considered. “Does your mother know about iceberg lettuce? It’s a new variety, very crisp, with wonderful keeping powers. After you’ve tried it, you’ll never want to see the old Boston lettuce again. Simpson lettuce, they call it.” Dottie sighed. Did Kay realize, she wondered, that she had just passed the death sentence on Boston lettuce, Boston baked beans, and the Boston School cookbook?