The Group

by Mary McCarthy

  Helena blew smoke rings—an art she had perfected as an aid against self-consciousness; all her life, she had submitted to being talked about, first and foremost by her mother. She was a short, sandy-haired girl with an appealing snub nose and an air of being sturdy though she was really thin and slight. She very much resembled her father, a short, sandy Scot who had made a pile of money in steel through knowing about alloys; he had been born in a little town called Iron Mountain, Michigan. Helena was regarded as the droll member of the group, having a puckish sense of humor, a slow, drawling way of talking, and a habit of walking around nude that had startled the others at first. Her figure was almost undeveloped, and when you saw her from a distance, hiking down a corridor to the shower with a towel around her neck, you might have thought she was a freckled little boy on his way to a swimming hole in the woods somewhere; her legs were slightly bowed, and her little patch of hair down there was a bright pinky red. She and Kay, when they first knew each other freshman year, used to climb trees together on Sunset Hill, back of the lake, and perform strange experiments in the Chem Lab, nearly blowing each other up. Yet Helena was intelligent, the group discovered, and in some ways very mature for her age. She had read a tremendous lot, particularly in modern literature, and listened to modern music, which was way over most of the group’s heads; she collected limited editions of verse and rare phonograph records of prepolyphonic church music. The group considered her quite an asset, almost a little mascot, in her neat Shetland sweater and skirt, riding across the campus on her bicycle or chasing butterflies with a net in the Shakespeare Garden.

  The worst, from Helena’s point of view, was that she knew all this, knew, that is, about the mascot and the swimming hole and how she looked with the butterfly net; she had been watched and described too carefully by too many experts—all indulgent and smiling, like the group. She had been registered for Vassar at birth; her mother had had her tutored in every conceivable subject all through her childhood. Helena (as her mother said) could play the violin, the piano, the flute, and the trumpet; she had sung alto in the choir. She had been a camp counselor and had a senior lifesaving badge. She played a good game of tennis, golfed, skied, and figure skated; she rode, though she had never jumped or hunted. She had a real chemistry set, a little printing press, a set of tooling leather, a pottery wheel, a library of wild-flower, fern, and bird books, a butterfly collection mounted on pins in glass cases, collections of sea shells, agates, quartz, and carnelians; these educational souvenirs were still kept in cupboards in her little sitting room in Cleveland, which had formerly been the nursery—her doll’s house and toys had been given away. She could write a severe little essay, imitate birdcalls, ring chimes, and play lacrosse as well as chess, checkers, mah-jongg, parcheesi, anagrams, dominoes, slapjack, pounce, rummy, whist, bridge, and cribbage. She knew most of the hymns in the Episcopal and Presbyterian hymnbooks by heart. She had had dancing lessons, ballroom, classical, and tap. She had done field walks in Geology and visited the State Asylum for the Insane, bunked in the Outing Cabin, and looked over the printing presses of the Duchess County Sentinel in Poughkeepsie. She had swum in the waterfall near Washington’s Crossing and attended the annual Greek play at the Bennett School in Millbrook. She and Kay, in Freshman Hygiene, were just about the only members of the class who actually inspected the dairies where the college cows were kept; one of the workmen had shown Helena how to milk. She knew china and had a small collection of snuffboxes at home that her mother had started for her; she knew Greek and Latin and could translate the worst passages of Krafft-Ebing without a shadow of embarrassment. She knew medieval French and the lays of the trouvères, though her accent was poor because her mother disapproved of French governesses, having heard of cases where these women drugged children or put their heads in the gas oven to make them go to sleep. At camp, Helena had learned to sail and sing old catches and sea chanties, some of them rather off-color; she improvised on the mouth organ and was studying the recorder. She had had art lessons since she was six and showed quite a gift for drawing. When Kay, senior year, had the group making those lists of who liked whom best, Helena cannily said she couldn’t decide and instead drew a big colored cartoon which she called “The Judgment of Paris,” showing them all in the nude, like goddesses, and herself very small in a jerkin with a dunce’s cap on her head and a wormy apple in her hand. Tickled, they hung it in their common sitting room, and there was quite a controversy about whether they should take it down at Prom time when they had some of their beaux in to tea; the modest members of the group, like Dottie and Polly Andrews, were afraid of being considered fast because the likenesses were so realistic that somebody might have thought they had posed.

  Having been Kay’s roommate (before they all grouped together) and had her to stay in Cleveland, Helena accepted her mother’s dictum, that Kay was her “best friend,” though they were no longer as close as they had been before sex entered Kay’s life. Helena had known about sex from a very early age but treated it as a joke, like what she called your plumbing. She was dry and distant toward the fond passion, as she called it, and was amused by Kay’s ardors for Harald, whom she coolly dubbed “Harald Handfast”—an allusion to the Old English custom of bedding before wedding. To her, men in general were a curious species, like the unicorn; for Harald in particular her feelings were circumspect and consisted chiefly of a mental protest against the way he spelled his name. Her parents, however, liked him and approved of Kay’s choice. When his play was in Cleveland last winter, Mr. Davison had offered him a card to his club, which he did not use much himself, he said, “being a plain fellow.”

  Kay herself was a favorite with Helena’s mother, and, whenever she came to stay, Mrs. Davison, who was a great talker, liked to discuss Helena with her at breakfast, over her second cup of coffee in the handsome paneled breakfast room while Helena herself was still sleeping and only the toby jugs and Mr. Davison’s collection of English china stirrup cups made in the form of foxes’ heads were able (commented Helena) to listen. Knowing the two participants, Helena, in her sleep, could have told how the conversation would go. “She has had every opportunity,” emphasized Mrs. Davison, with an impressive look at Kay, who was respectfully drinking her orange juice, which was served in cracked ice. “Every opportunity.” This way of stressing and repeating her words would lead Kay to think that Mrs. Davison was implying, for Kay’s ears alone, that Helena had been a grave disappointment to her mother. But this was an error, as other chums of Helena’s had found. Accustomed to public speaking, Mrs. Davison always paused and intensified to let her words slowly sink in, even with an audience of one. Her real belief was that Helena was turning out extremely well, though she greatly wondered, she said to Kay, that Helena had not “seen fit” to go on with her art at college. “Davy Davison and I,” she explained, “would have had no objection at all to Helena’s becoming a painter. After she had finished her college work. Her teacher here considered that she had unusual promise, a decided bent, and so did Mr. Smart at the museum. We had talked of giving her a year or two at the Art Students League in New York and of letting her have a studio in Greenwich Village. But her interests have widened at Vassar, dontcha know.” Kay agreed. Mrs. Davison also wondered that Helena had failed to make Phi Beta Kappa. “I said” (Kay reported to Helena), “that only grinds made Phi Beta junior year.” “Just as I told Davy Davison!” exclaimed Mrs. Davison. “Girls who have been coached and crammed.” Mrs. Davison often spoke with detestation of “crammers.”

  “I am not a college woman myself,” Mrs. Davison continued, “and it’s a thing I’ve bitterly regretted. I shall blame Davy Davison for it till they put pennies on my eyes.” This remark remained partly cryptic, like many of Mrs. Davison’s utterances, in which learned allusions—like this one to Roman burial customs—mingled with obscure personal reminiscence. Kay took her to mean that Mr. Davison had married her (in Mrs. Davison’s own parlance) “untimely,” which she found hard to imagine because, mu
ch as she liked her, she could not imagine Mrs. Davison young. Helena’s mother was a tall fat woman with piles of grey hair done in unfashionable puffs on either side of her ears and large, pensive, lustrous dark eyes that seemed misplaced in her big, doughy, plain countenance, which was white and shapeless, like bread punched down and set to rise again in a crock. She was a Canadian, from the province of Saskatchewan, and spoke in somewhat breathy tones.

  In point of fact, she had been a country schoolteacher and well along in life, rising thirty, when Mr. Davison had met her, at the home of a metallurgist. If she could not write “B.A.” after her name, it had been by her own choice: in the annus mirabilis (1901) when the university had opened at Saskatoon—a story she was fond of telling—she had gone to inspect the professors and found she knew more than they did. “Like the Child Jesus in the temple, toute proportion gardée,” she avowed. Nevertheless, she harbored a mysterious grievance against Mr. Davison for not having been permitted to finish, as she put it, her education. “We’ll have to buy Mother an honorary degree for her golden wedding anniversary,” Helena’s father sometimes remarked.

  Both Mr. and Mrs. Davison had an emphatic distaste for show. Mrs. Davison wore no jewelry, except for her wedding and engagement rings and occasional Victorian brooches set with garnets, her birthstone, fastened to the bosom of her coin-print or polka-dot dresses. Helena had a set of moonstones, a cat’s-eye brooch, an amethyst pin, and an Add-a-Pearl necklace that had been completed on her eighteenth birthday, when she was presented to society (that is, to the family’s old friends) at a small tea given by her mother in their house, which was called “The Cottage” and had a walled garden and English wallflowers.

  The Davison house—Kay had told the group—was almost magical, like a house you found in a fairy tale, though it was right in the heart of Cleveland, only two blocks from a streetcar stop but hidden by tall privet hedges and the garden wall. It was small, compact, and silent, with chintz-cushioned window seats and rocking chairs and cupboards and shelves and “dressers” full of fragile, precious things that were used for everyday, like instructive toys you could play with—milk glass, Sandwich glass, Wedgwood, Staffordshire, Lowestoft, Crown Derby. A table seemed almost always to be set, for breakfast, lunch, tea, or dinner, with toast racks, muffin warmers, a Lazy Susan (Kay had never heard the name before, even), muffineers full of powdered sugar, finger bowls in which flowers floated. Yet there were no butlers or footmen darting around to make you nervous for fear of using the wrong utensils. When Helena, who was always the last down, had finished her breakfast, the colored maid would bring in a big china basin with pretty pink roses on it and a pitcher full of hot water, and Mrs. Davison would wash the breakfast cups and saucers at the table (an old pioneer custom, she said) and dry them on an embroidered tea towel. At dinner, after the main course, the maid would bring in a salad bowl of Chinese porcelain, red and green, and an old cruet stand with olive oil, a mustard pot, and vials of different kinds of vinegar, and Mr. Davison, standing up, would make the salad dressing himself and mix the salad, which was always sprinkled with fresh herbs. They did not entertain very often; most of the family friends, Kay said, were rather old, bachelors or widows, and neither Mr. Davison (whose real name was Edward) nor Mrs. Davison was enthusiastic about what they humorously called “followers,” though Helena, being an only child, had been given every opportunity at her progressive day school to meet boys and girls of her own age. Not to mention dancing school and Sunday school; neither Mr. Davison nor Mrs. Davison was a regular churchgoer (although Mrs. Davison was a sharp judge of a sermon), but they felt it only right that Helena should know the Bible and the beliefs of the principal Christian creeds, so that she could make up her own mind.

  After day school, she had gone to a sound boarding school in New England with a well-rounded curriculum but no frills. In the summers, they had taken cottages at Watch Hill, Rhode Island, at Yarmouth in Nova Scotia, and at Biddeford Pool in Maine, and Helena had always had her friends come to visit her there and, after she was eighteen and had had driving lessons, the use of a small Ford runabout, as Mrs. Davison described it, which Mr. Davison had bought for a second car.

  For the summer of 1930, after freshman year, they had planned a trip through the Lake District (Mrs. Davison was a great admirer of Dorothy Wordsworth), but with business conditions what they were, they had concluded that it was best to stay home, where Mr. Davison could keep an eye on developments. None of the other girls from Vassar was going, as Mrs. Davison had ascertained.

  This last June, it was Mr. Davison who had suddenly declared that Helena needed a change. At Commencement, he had thought she looked peaked and had told her mother so. She had better go to Europe and look around for a few months by herself, before going to work at that nursery school, which was dang-fool nonsense anyway. With all Helena’s education, she had elected to play the piano and teach Dalcroze and finger painting at an experimental school in Cleveland—to a darned lot of kikes’ children, from what Mr. Davison had heard. Where was the sense in that, he had asked Kay angrily at lunch after Commencement, while Mrs. Davison said “Now, Daddy!” and Kay and Helena exchanged looks. “All right, Mother.” Mr. Davison had subsided momentarily. Kay suspected that he was angry because Helena had failed to get magna cum laude, when a lot of the Jewish girls had. Mrs. Davison evidently had the same thought, because she now cleared her throat and remarked that the simple cum laude, Helena’s meed, was the sign of a real student as opposed to what, in her day, had been called “a greasy grind.” “I watched those magnas go up for their diplomas,” she announced, “and I didn’t like the look of them at all; they smelled of the lamp, as I told Davy Davison. The midnight oil, dontcha know.” “Oh, Mother!” said Helena and raised her eyebrows in distress. Mr. Davison would not be diverted. “Why should Helena take a job away from some girl who really needs it? Can you tell me that?” he demanded, pushing his fried chicken away. His small round cheeks had turned red. Kay started to answer, but Mrs. Davison intervened. “Now, Daddy,” she said placidly, “do you mean to assert that a girl in Helena’s position doesn’t have the same rights as other girls?”

  “I mean exactly that,” Mr. Davison retorted. “You’ve hit the nail smack on the head. We pay a price for having money. People in my position”—he turned to Kay—“have ‘privilege.’ That’s what I read in the Nation and the New Republic.” Mrs. Davison nodded. “Good,” said Mr. Davison. “Now listen. The fellow who’s got privilege gives up some rights or ought to.” “I’m not sure I understand,” said Kay. “Sure you do,” said Mr. Davison. “So do Mother and Helena.” “Let’s choose another example,” said Mrs. Davison thoughtfully. “If Helena, say, were to paint a picture. Would she not have the right to sell it because other artists are impecunious?” “A painting isn’t a service, Mother,” said Mr. Davison. “Helena’s offering a service that a hundred other girls in Cleveland could do as well.” At this point, the discussion broke off; the waiter presented the check, which Mr. Davison paid. Helena herself had hardly said a word.

  Afterward, Kay declared that Mr. Davison’s ideas were surprisingly unfair and that the trip to Europe was a bribe that would corrupt Helena’s integrity. She was amazed (and she repeated it today, right to Helena’s face) that Helena had gone meekly off to Europe with her tail between her legs and stayed till just before Christmas. And now that she was back she was making no effort to get a job but talking of studying dry point in Cleveland and taking a course in acrobatic dancing at the Y.W.C.A., of all places. Nor was it a question of just marking time till she got married, like some other girls; Helena, Kay said, would never get married—she was a neuter, like a little mule. Therefore it was up to her to realize her potentialities. She and Kay were just the opposite of each other, Kay had been telling Mr. Bergler this afternoon.

  “Really?” said Mr. Bergler. “How?” “In college I wanted to be a director,” Kay replied. “Come here, Helena,” she called loudly. “We’re talking about you.”
Unwillingly, Helena approached; she was wearing a skullcap hat and a black velvet dress, with buttons straight down the front and a little old-lace collar with her cat’s-eye brooch. “I was saying I always wanted to be a director,” Kay continued. “Well!” said the producer, an unassuming grey-haired Jewish man with white soft skin and flat grey fish eyes. “So that’s what you and Hal have in common.” Kay nodded. “I directed one of the Hall Plays at college. That’s different from DP—Dramatic Production, which Hallie teaches—Hallie Flanagan, have you heard of her? Anyway, the Hall Plays are part of Philaletheis, which is just a student thing. It sounds like stamp collecting. But it means something different—loving the theatre. In DP, Hallie would never let me direct. I worked on the lighting with Lester—Lester Lang, her assistant; you probably haven’t heard of him. And I built scenery.” “And now?” “I gave it up,” said Kay with a sigh. “Now I work at Mr. Macy’s, in the training squad. I have the drive but not the talent. That’s what Harald said when he saw the Hall Play I directed. It was The Winter’s Tale—in the Outdoor Theatre. Helena played Autolycus.”

  The producer turned his eyes to Helena. “That’s what I started to say,” Kay went on, remembering. “I lost the thread for a minute. I have the drive but not the talent, and Helena has the talents but not the drive.” “You’re interested in a stage career?” inquired the producer curiously, bending down to Helena. “Oh no,” Kay answered for Helena. “Helena’s a mime but not an actress. That’s what Harald thinks. No. But Helena has so many other talents that she can’t choose between them—canalize. She writes and sings and paints and dances and plays I don’t know how many instruments. The compleat girl. I was telling Mr. Bergler about your parents, Helena. She has the most remarkable parents. How many magazines does your mother ‘take in’? Her mother is a Canadian,” she added while Helena stood pondering with a fresh cup of punch in her hand. She was being called upon, she recognized, to perform for Mr. Bergler, and she was going to do it, just as she used to recite or play under her mother’s eye, feeling like a conscientious wind-up toy. She had a “searching” anxious little gaze, which she now directed upward at Mr. Bergler from under the reddish eaves of her brows.