The Group

by Mary McCarthy

  “Well,” she began, grimacing and drawling her words, “there’s the National Geographic, Christian Century, the Churchman, Theatre Arts Monthly, the Stage, the Nation, the New Republic, Scribner’s, Harper’s, the Bookman, the Forum, the London Times Literary Supplement, the Economist, the Spectator, Blackwood’s, Life and Letters Today, the Nineteenth Century and After, Punch, L’Illustration, Connaissance des Arts, Antiques, Country Life, Isis, the PMLA, the Lancet, the American Scholar, the annual report of the College Boards, Vanity Fair, the American Mercury, the New Yorker, and Fortune (those four are for Daddy, but Mother ‘glances them over’).”

  “You’re forgetting some,” said Kay. Mr. Bergler smiled; he was supposed to be rather a Communist. “The Atlantic Monthly, surely,” he suggested. Helena shook her head. “No. Mother is having a ‘feud’ with the Atlantic Monthly. She disapproved of something in the Jalna series and canceled her subscription. Mother dearly loves canceling her subscriptions—as a painful duty. Her feud with the Saturday Review of Literature has been very hard on her, because of the ‘Double-Crostic.’ She’s thought of resubscribing in our maid’s name, but she fears they might recognize the address.” “She sounds a most awesome lady,” said Mr. Bergler, responding to Helena’s faint grin. “Tell me, what does she find objectionable in the Saturday Review of Literature? Has sex reared its head there?” “Oh,” said Helena. “You misjudge my mother. She’s impervious to sex.” A publisher’s reader who lived in the apartment downstairs had come up to listen; he gave Libby MacAusland’s arm a little squeeze. “I love that, don’t you?” he said. “Mother’s shock area,” continued Helena imperturbably, “is confined to the higher brain centers; the ‘bump’ of grammar and usage is highly developed. She’s morally offended by impure English.” “Like what?” encouraged Kay. “Dangling modifiers. Improper prepositions. ‘Aggravating’ to mean ‘annoying,’ ‘demean’ to mean ‘lower,’ ‘sinister.’” “‘Sinister’?” echoed the publisher’s reader. “Mother says it only means left-handed or done with the left hand. If you tell her a person is sinister, all she will infer, she says, is that he’s left-handed. A deed, she allows, may be sinister, if it’s done sidewise or ‘under the robe’ or ‘on the wrong side of the blanket.’” “I never heard that!” cried Pokey, as if indignant. The group around Helena had grown larger and was forming into a circle. “‘Infer,’ ‘imply,’” prompted Libby, eager to be heard. “Ummhum,” said Helena. “But that’s too commonplace to be under Mother’s special protection. ‘Meticulous,’ which is not a synonym for ‘neat.’ She sets great store by Latin roots, you notice, but she frowns on the ablative absolute as a construction in English.” “Yow!” said Harald’s friend, Mr. Sisson, the one who had taken pictures at the wedding. “Oh, and ‘I cannot help but feel.’” “What’s wrong with that?” asked several voices. “‘I cannot help feeling’ or ‘I cannot but feel.’” “More!” said the publisher’s reader. Helena demurred. “I cannot help feeling,” she said, “that that is enough of Mother’s ‘pet peeves.’”

  Her mother’s habit of stressing and underlining her words had undergone an odd mutation in being transmitted to Helena. Where Mrs. Davison stressed and emphasized, Helena inserted her words carefully between inverted commas, so that clauses, phrases, and even proper names, inflected, by her light voice, had the sound of being ironical quotations. While everything Mrs. Davison said seemed to carry with it a guarantee of authority, everything Helena said seemed subject to the profoundest doubt. “I saw ‘Miss Sandison,’” she had been telling Kay and Dottie, “in the ‘British Museum,’” signifying by the lifting of her brows and the rolling about of the names on her slow, dry tongue that “Miss Sandison” was an alias of some wondrous sort and the “British Museum” a front or imposture. This wry changing of pitch had become mechanical with her, like a slide inserted in a trombone. In fact, she had a great respect for her former Shakespeare teacher and for the British Museum. She had had a library card virtually from the time she could walk and was as much at home with the various systems of cataloguing as she was with the Furness Variorum. At college she had excelled at the “note topic”—a favorite with Miss Sandison too—and had many wooden boxes full of neatly classified cards on her desk beside the portable typewriter she had got for Christmas junior year—Mrs. Davison had not wished her to take up typing till her handwriting was formed; for a period in Cleveland she had had a calligraphy lesson every other day between her music lesson and her riding lesson and she had learned to cut her own quills from feathers. Nothing, moreover, was more natural than that she should find her teacher, an Elizabethan specialist, in the British Museum, yet Helena had gone on to explain methodically, as though it required accounting for, the circumstances that had brought this about: how Miss Sandison was doing a paper, in her sabbatical leave, on a little-known Elizabethan, “Arthur Gorges,” and Helena was looking up an early publication of “Dorothy Richardson” and had stopped to see the “Elgin Marbles.” In relating such “true particulars,” Helena lowered her voice and gravely puckered her forehead, with a confidential air like her mother’s, as though giving privileged news from a sickroom in which lay a common friend.

  “A cute kid, that,” the producer told Harald, when he was leaving. “Reminds me of the young Hepburn—before they glamorized her. Clubwoman mother there too.” Helena found nothing to object to in the last part of this “tribute.” “Mother is a clubwoman,” she pointed out mildly to Kay, who felt that Mrs. Davison had been disparaged. “And I don’t like Katharine Hepburn.” She wished people would stop making this comparison. Mrs. Davison had been the first to notice a resemblance. “She was a Bryn Mawr girl, Helena. Class of ’29. Davy Davison and I saw her with Jane Cowl. She wore her hair short like yours.”

  Wearily, Helena eyed the bedroom door. She wanted to go home or, rather, to go have dinner with Dottie at the Forty-ninth Street Longchamps, across from the Vassar Club. She knew that when she got back to Cleveland, she would be bound to report to her mother how she had “found” Kay and Harald, what their new apartment was like, and how Harald was making out in his career. “I have always been partial to Kay,” Mrs. Davison would state, satisfied, when Helena had finished her narration. It was one of Mrs. Davison’s peculiarities, well known to Helena, that, like royalty, she insisted that all news be favorable and reflect a steady advance of human affairs.

  It was wonderful news, of course, that Harald’s play was going to be produced, yet neither Kay nor Harald seemed very happy. Possibly, as Dottie suggested, success had been too slow in coming. Dottie had heard a painful story: that Harald had been helping a puppeteer who gave shows at vulgar rich people’s parties; someone had seen him behind the scenes working the lights in the little portable puppet theater—he was not allowed to mingle with the guests. Kay had never mentioned this to a soul. Today, she looked strained and tired, and Harald was drinking too much. He was right; the party had not “jelled.” The producer and his wife had seemed mystified by so much Vassar; Helena feared Harald’s stock had gone down. Kay craved the limelight for the group, but the limelight did not become them. As Harald said, they did not know how to “project.” Of all the girls here this afternoon, only Kay, in his and Helena’s opinion—they had agreed on this, by the punch bowl—was a genuine beauty. Yet she was losing her vivid coloring, which would distress Mrs. Davison, who admired the “roses” in Kay’s cheeks.

  The bedroom door opened. The love birds had made it up. Kay was smiling dewily, and Harald’s cigarette holder was cocked at a jaunty angle. He had a big bowl of chile con carne, Kay announced, that he had fixed this morning, and everyone was to stay and eat. Afterward, if the guests were agreeable, he was going to read aloud an act from his play. There was no help for it, Helena and Dottie were bound to stay; Kay was counting on them. Harald went out to the kitchen, refilling his punch glass en route; he would not let Kay help him—she was tired, and this was her holiday. “Isn’t that touching?” murmured Dottie. Helena was not touched. Harald, s
he presumed, knew Kay as well as she did, and if there was anything Kay hated, it was being left out; she was a glutton for making herself useful. They heard Harald moving about in the kitchen, the rattle of plates, the creak of drawers opening. Kay could not contain herself. “Can’t I make the coffee?” she called out. “No!” Harald’s voice retorted. “Entertain your guests.” Kay looked around the circle with a defeated, anxious smile. “I’ll help him,” volunteered Dottie as the rattle of crockery continued. “No,” said Norine. “I’ll do it. I know the kitchen.” With a purposeful stride, she went out; the shuttered door trembled as she pulled it shut. “She’ll make the coffee too weak,” Kay said sadly to Helena. “And she’ll want to use paper napkins.” “Forget about it,” advised Helena.

  The radio actor turned to Kay. He was more than a little drunk; the cigarette in his hand wavered. “Give me a light, will you?” Kay looked around; there were no matches; all the little booklets were empty. Putnam silently proffered his burning pipe. As the actor stabbed his cigarette into the bowl, some coals fell on the newly waxed floor. “Oh, dear!” cried Kay, stamping them out. “I’ll get some matches from the kitchen.” “I’ll do it,” said Helena.

  In the small kitchen, behind the slatted door, she found Norine and Harald locked in an embrace. Her classmate’s tall, rangy figure, like that of a big lynx or bobcat, was bent back as Harald kissed her, pressing forward in a sort of feral lunge. The scene reminded Helena, for some reason, of German silent films. Norine’s tawny eyes were closed, and an Oriental turban she wore—her own millinery achievement—had come partly unwound. A dish towel was lying on the floor. Their wet mouths drew apart as Helena entered, and their heads turned to look at her. Then they heard Kay call. “Did you find them? Harald, give her the kitchen matches, will you?” Helena saw the box of matches on the stove. Norine and Harald backed away from each other, and she hurriedly dodged between them. “Gangway,” she said. She picked up the towel and tossed it to Harald. Then she seized the matches and made for the living room. Her small hand shook with borrowed guilt as she struck the big sulphur match and held it for the actor to take a light from. It went out. She lit another. The room, she noted, was full of the smell of brimstone.

  In a few minutes Norine strode in with a tray of plates and a box of paper napkins, and Harald followed with his chile. Everyone ate. The radio actor resumed his critique of Sheepskin. “The fall of a just man is precipitous,” replied Harald, with a side glance at Helena. He set his plate down with a slight lurch. “Excuse me while I go to the toilet.” “The fall of a just man,” repeated the actor. “How well Harald puts it. The college president starts at the top, politicians put the skids under him, and he shoots right down to the bottom. It’s a bold conception, no doubt, but not an actor’s conception.” “Wasn’t Shakespeare an actor?” suddenly spoke up the naval officer. “What’s that got to do with my point?” said the actor. “Well, I mean, King Lear,” said the officer. “Doesn’t he start at the top?” “King Lear,” remarked Helena, “was hardly a just man.” They heard the closet flush. “And there’s relief in Lear,” said the actor. “Cordelia. Kent. The fool. In Harald’s play there’s no relief. Harald claims that would be fakery.” “Clara’s cake!” cried Kay, as coffee was being served. “Harald! We’ve got to serve Clara’s cake. I promised her. I’m afraid her feelings were hurt when we wouldn’t let her pass it with the punch.” “When I wouldn’t let her pass it,” corrected Harald with a melancholy air. “Why don’t you say what you mean, Kay?” Kay turned to the others. “Wait till you see it. She made it for our party and brought it down from Harlem on a paper lace doily. Clara’s a wonderful character. She runs a high-class funeral parlor. Tiger Flowers was buried from it. You ought to hear her description of him ‘laying in state.’ And I love it when she talks about her competitors. ‘Those fly-by-night undertakers are takin’ our business away.’” “Get the cake,” said Harald. “Your darky imitation is terrible.” “You imitate her, Harald!” “Get the cake,” he repeated. They waited for Kay to come back. They could hear her washing up. The cat seemed to have got Norine’s tongue, and “Putnam Blake” was no conversationalist. Dottie passed the coffee again. When it was his turn to be served, he nudged Helena. “Look, real cream!” he said, his peculiar eyes aglow. Helena could see that this excited him more than anything that had happened at the party.

  Kay came in with fresh plates and a cake on a doily on a pink glass platter. The frosting was decorated with a maraschino cherry tree and a chocolate hatchet. “Oh, bless her heart!” said Dottie. “Her old black heart,” said Harald, eying the cake askance. “Straight from a Harlem bakery,” he pronounced. Kay put a hand to her cheek. “Oh, no!” she said. “Clara wouldn’t tell me a lie.” Harald smiled darkly. “A most villainous cake. ‘Let them eat bread.’ Don’t you agree, my friend?” He turned to the naval officer. “Look at the frosting,” said the actor. “It’s pure Lavoris.”

  Tears appeared in Kay’s eyes. Defiantly, she began to cut the cake. “Kay loves to be a gull,” said Harald. “In the simplicity of her heart, she imagines that old coon happily baking for ‘Miss Kay’ and ‘Mister Man.’” “I think it’s touching,” said Dottie quickly. “And I’ll bet it tastes delicious.” She accepted a piece and began to eat it. The others followed suit, except for Harald, who shook his head when the platter was passed to him. “Down the incinerator with it!” he declared with a flourish of his coffee spoon. There was a laugh and a silence. It appeared that Harald had been right. “It’s like eating frosted absorbent cotton,” murmured the actor to Helena. Helena set her plate aside. In Kay’s place, she would not have served the cake—from a purely practical motive: so that the maid would not be encouraged to waste her money again. But she did not find Harald’s “antic hay” very amusing, all things considered. He had put on the motley, she felt, for her special benefit to tell her that he was a Man of Sorrows. Was he afraid she would give him away, poor devil? Helena would have been glad to reassure him. “I shall listen to no tales, Helena,” her mother had always admonished her if she came to report on a playmate. Helena did not “care for” what she had seen, but she assumed the bottle was responsible and felt a certain sympathy for Harald’s present discomfort. He was being bad to Kay, she supposed, because if he were amiable, Helena would consider him a whited sepulcher.

  Across the room Kay was talking—rather boisterously, Helena felt—about wedding presents. Helena’s pity for her had taken the form of acute embarrassment. Kay was on a stage without knowing it. Three ironic spectators, counting Helena, were watching her and listening. The strangest objects, she was saying, were still arriving by parcel post—right in a class with Clara’s cake. “Look at these, for instance.” She brought out an ugly red glass decanter and six little cordial glasses that had come (she could hardly believe it) from one of her childhood friends in Salt Lake City. “What can we do with them? Send them to the Salvation Army?” “Give them to Clara,” said the actor. Nearly everyone laughed. “Down the incinerator with them!” said Harald suddenly.

  They were examining the decanter, holding it up to the light, arguing about workmanship and mass production, when they heard the front door close. The pink glass platter with the remains of the cake on it was gone. Harald was gone too. “Where did he disappear to?” said the naval officer. “I thought he was in the kitchen,” said Norine. Then the doorbell rang. Harald had locked himself out. “Where have you been?” they demanded. “Giving the cake a Viking’s funeral. A beau geste, was it not?” He saluted the group. “Oh, Harald,” said Kay sadly. “That was Clara’s cake plate.” The actor giggled. With an air of decision, Harald began to collect the little red cordial glasses. “You take the decanter, my friend,” he said to the actor. The actor obeyed and followed him, humming the Dead March from Saul. “Are they spiffed?” whispered Dottie. Helena nodded. This time Harald left the door open, and the group in the living room could hear a distant crash of glass breaking as the set went down the incinerator in the hall
. “Next?” said Harald, returning. “What next, my dear?” Kay tried to laugh. “I’d better stop him,” she said to the others, “or he’ll make a general holocaust of all our goods and chattels.” “Yes, stop him,” urged Putnam. “This is serious.” “Don’t be a wet blanket,” said the actor. “Let’s make a game of it. Everybody choose his candidate for the incinerator.” Kay jumped up. “Harald,” she said, coaxing. “Why don’t you read us your play instead? You promised.” “Ah yes,” said Harald. “And it’s getting late. And you have to work tomorrow. But you give me an idea.” He went into the dinette and took a manuscript in a gray folder from a cupboard.

  “Down the incinerator with it!” His tall, lean, sinewy figure paused a moment by the bookcase, then began to skirt the furniture: Norine’s voice was heard ordering someone to stop him, and Putnam and the naval officer moved to block his way to the door. The actor leaped for the manuscript, and there was a sound of tearing paper as Harald wrenched it away. Holding it tight to his chest, with his free hand he pushed off his pursuers, like somebody racing for a touchdown. At the door, there was a scuffle, but Harald managed to open it, and it slammed behind him. He did not return. “Oh, well,” said Kay. “Could he have thrown himself down the incinerator?” whispered Dottie. “No,” said the actor. “I thought of that. It’s too small for a man’s body.” For a moment no one spoke.