The Group

by Mary McCarthy

  The Protheros entertained, but only at dinner; Mrs. Prothero was not equal to leading the talk at luncheon. Mr. Prothero always took his lunch at the Brook or the Racquet or the Knickerbocker, and the girls were told to have their friends to lunch at the Club, to save making extra work for Hatton. That was the Madam’s way of putting it, but Hatton had never shirked work, as she ought to know. It was Hatton who planned Mrs. Prothero’s dinners, bringing her the menus and a diagram of the seating arrangements, before writing out the place cards; the conundrum of seating eight or sixteen had never been unriddled by Mrs. Prothero, who always looked up at Hatton with faint surprised alarm when she found another lady opposite her, where she was used to seeing Mr. Prothero, at the other end of the long table. Mrs. Prothero’s life was too inactive to warrant her having a social secretary, except during the two seasons when the girls were coming out. Hatton managed her invitations and her acceptances, told her who was coming to dinner and whom she was going to. He directed her contributions to charity and sometimes, on a night when they were entertaining, was able to suggest a topic for conversation.

  Needless to say, he was also in the habit of giving the girls a hand. “Hatton, you’re a genius!” Miss Mary and Miss Phyllis were always shrieking when they did a list or seated a table in consultation with him. “Infallible social sense,” Mr. Prothero often muttered, of the butler, with a wink and a peculiar movement of the cheek muscle that gave him a paralyzed appearance. The girls had more confidence too in Hatton’s judgment in matters of dress than they had in Annette’s or Forbes’s; they would come up to his room in their ball gowns, twirl around before him, and ask him whether they should wear the pearls or the Madam’s diamonds or carry a scarf or a fan. It had been Hatton, in alliance with Forbes, who had seen to it that Miss Phyllis was made to wear a patch over one eye, as well as keep the braces on her teeth; if Hatton had not backed up Forbes, poor Miss Phyllis would be, as Forbes said, a regular Ben Turpin today.

  The whole family adored Hatton. “We all adore Hatton,” Miss Mary would announce in a vigorous whisper, shielding her pursed mouth with one hand, to a young man who was seeing her home, for the first time, from a tea dance or a young lady who was coming, for the first time, to stay; the butler’s trained features would remain impassive as he led the way up the stairs, though the pretense of not hearing would have tried an inferior servant, since both the young ladies were not only blind as moles but had loud, flat, unaware voices like the voices of deaf people, so that even when they whispered everyone turned around to look at them and listen to what they were saying. They had inherited this trait, another sign of blue blood, from their grandmother on their father’s side.

  Hatton, though he took no notice, partly from habit, was not displeased that the young ladies made it a point that nobody who stayed in the house or came to dinner should fail to appreciate him. The slow ceremoniousness of his manners, his strict austere bearing ought to have spoken for themselves, but it was a convention, he understood, among the better class of Americans, to pretend that the service was invisible, which was their little way of showing that they were used to being waited on. This offended Hatton’s professional pride and had caused him to leave his last place. With the Prothero family, being more of the old school, his exceptional endowment and qualifications were brought into the limelight, and the more unobtrusive he made himself, the more all heads turned surreptitiously to watch his deportment as he entered or left a room. He had only to close a door, noiselessly, or retire into the pantry to know that the family and its guests were discussing him. To be aware of Hatton was a proof of intimacy with the family—a boast, you might say, particularly among the young people. “Hatton’s a wonder,” the tall young gentlemen who were going on to a dance in white ties and tails would confide to each other, profoundly, over the coffee and the brandy when the young ladies had left the dining room. “Hatton’s a wonder, sir,” they would say to Mr. Prothero, at the head of the table. Hatton did not have to be psychic (which Miss Mary liked to let on he was) to surmise, from a glance through the pantry door, the trend of the conversation. The Vassar young ladies upstairs not all being used to society, the footman who served the Benedictine and the crème de menthe sometimes came down with a tale to tell, but with the young gentlemen over the brandy it was always the same.

  “Like one of the family,” Mr. Prothero would reply. “Kind of an institution, Hatton is. Famous.” Hatton was not sure that he cared to be described as “like one of the family”; he had always maintained his distance, even when the young ladies were toddlers. But he did feel himself to be an institution in the household and was used to being looked up to, like a portrait statue raised on a tall shaft in a London square. With this end in mind, he had perfected an absolute immobility of expression, which was one of his chief points, he knew, as a monument and invariably drawn to the attention of visitors. The signals directing attention to his frozen, sculptured face on the part of the young ladies and their friends Hatton was perfectly familiar with and accepted as a form of compliment while not, even inwardly, moving a muscle. When asked about the family he had served so long and with such apparent suppression of self (“Hatton is devoted to us,” Mrs. Prothero declared, in one of her rare positive assertions of any kind), he would answer, with reserve, that it was “a good place.” Miss Phyllis, when she was younger, used to pester him to say he liked her, being the ugly duckling, not that the rest were swans, but all Hatton would answer was simply, “It’s a good place, miss.” The same with the master when he was half-seas over and Hatton was guiding him to bed: “You like us, eh, eh, Hatton? After all these years, eh?” Forbes, a stout party from Glasgow who had been with the family ever since Miss Mary was born, sometimes reminded Hatton that there were better places: a first-class butler, she said, was not supposed to act as a social secretary and valet, besides being a Holmes Protective man and a human fire-alarm system (this was Forbes’s joke). “Beggars can’t be choosers,” Hatton, who was fond of a proverb, coldly retorted, but he really meant the opposite: a butler of his capacities could choose to take on extra duties without prejudicing his legend. He was the bigger man for it. Hatton, through doing crossword puzzles, was familiar with the principal myths, and his mind sometimes vaguely dwelt on the story of Apollo serving King Admetus, not that he would place Mr. Prothero so high. Yet the comparison occasionally flashed through his head when he was waiting on table, throwing a spacious aureole or nimbus around him as he moved from one chair to the next, murmuring “Sherry, madam?” or “Champagne, miss?” Miss Mary, he felt, was aware of the nimbus, for he would find her nearsighted eyes frowningly focused on him, as if observing something unusual, and her nostrils sniffing, a sign of aroused attention she had probably-picked up from the Madam; the poor young lady herself had no sense of smell. Miss Mary swore by telepathy; she had a sixth sense, she insisted, to make up for the missing one. She had decided that Hatton had too. “Are your ears burning, Hatton?” she often asked him when he came to answer the bell in a room where she and her friends were playing one of those mind-reading games, with cards, she had learned at Vassar. He explained to her that it was the job of a good servant to read his master’s mind and anticipate his wishes; for him, he added reprovingly, it was all in the day’s work, no fun and games about it. “How did you become a butler, Hatton?” she sometimes asked, seating herself on his bed. “Yes, how did you, Hatton?” said Miss Phyllis, occupying his footstool. But Hatton declined to answer. “That is my private affair, miss.” “I think,” said Miss Mary, “you decided to become a butler because you were psychic. Natural selection.” This was over Hatton’s head, but he did not allow the fact to be seen. Miss Mary turned to Miss Phyllis. “It proves my point, Phyl. Don’t you get it? Darwin. The survival of the fittest.” Her loud peremptory voice resounded through the servants’ quarters. “If Hatton wasn’t psychic he’d be a flop as a butler. Ergo, he is psychic. Q.E.D.” She scratched her head and beamed victoriously at Hatton. “Pretty smart, eh wo
t?” “Very smart, miss,” Hatton agreed, wondering if this was the Darwin who had discovered the missing link. “Girrls!” came Forbes’s voice from below. “Come down and get into your baths.”

  The fact was, Hatton had become a butler because his father had been in service. But he too had come to feel that there was something more to it than this; like Miss Mary said, he had had a vocation or a higher call that had bade him assume the office. This conviction had slowly overtaken him in America, where genuine English butlers did not grow on trees. “You’re the real article, Hatton!” a gentleman who had come to stay in the Long Island house had said to him one morning with an air of surprise. He was like a stage butler or a butler you saw on the films, the gentleman doubtless meant to imply. Hatton had been pleased to hear it; being somewhat younger then and on his own, so to speak, in a foreign country, he had tried to conform to an ideal of the English butler as he found it in films and in crime stories and in the funny papers that Cook read, for the wise man knew how to turn the smallest occasion to profit. Yet he now felt that study alone could not have done it. When the young ladies told him he was a genius, he believed they had hit on the truth: “out of the mouths of babes.” He had long accepted the fact that he was the brains of the family and the heavy obligation that went with it. The eternal model of the English butler, which he kept before his eyes, even in his moments of relaxation and on his day off, required that he have the attributes of omniscience and ubiquity, like they taught you in the catechism: “Where is God?” “God is everywhere.” Hatton was Church of England, and did not mean to blaspheme, but he could not help noticing those little correspondences, as when he had observed, in his earlier situation, that he was expected to be invisible too.

  Folding the newspaper, Hatton sighed. One of the duties or accomplishments of the classic English butler, of which he personally was the avatar, was to be well informed on matters that would not at first glance seem to be relevant to the job in hand and also to be a past master of proper names. That was why, at present, he was reading the Herald Tribune, on behalf of the family, having already had a hasty look at Cook’s tabloid for the murders, and why he had started with the society columns and the sporting pages, to have a go at them while his mind was fresh. Hatton was not a sporting man, except for the races and, back home, the cricket, but duty obliged him to take cognizance of the proper names and lineage of dogs, cats, boats, horses, polo players, golfers, as they appeared in the news, together with all sorts of figures and ratings, since it was these names and figures that were most commonly wanted in the Prothero household. Then there were the society columns, for the Madam and the girls. When a young gentleman got married, it was Hatton who struck his name off Miss Mary’s list, and when a young lady announced her engagement, it was Hatton who reminded Miss Mary or Miss Phyllis to buy a wedding present—a thing Miss Mary often neglected or sent Annette to do.

  Selecting a green pencil, Hatton made a small check on the society page; this meant: present, Miss Phyllis; a red-pencil check meant: present, Miss Mary. With a new sigh, this time of content, he folded the paper to the obituary page—one of his favorite sections. Yet even here the voice of duty intruded, though not, he saw at a glance, this evening: he would not have to warn Yvonne, Mrs. Prothero’s personal maid, to look over her mistress’ blacks, nor get Mr. Prothero ready to be a pallbearer. He settled down to the obits. Next, he turned to the stock-market pages, which no longer interested him much personally; he had not had a flyer since the fall of ’29; but he kept abreast of the market in order to follow the conversation at the dinner table when the senior Protheros were entertaining and the ladies had left the room. In the back of his mind, there was always the thought of picking up a tip from one of the older gentlemen, but he had not yet refound the courage to call his broker with an order.

  Relighting his pipe, he studied the entertainment news, to make sure the film he planned to see on his day out was still playing. He read Percy Hammond’s review of the play that had opened the night before. Hatton had never been to a proper theatre, only to music hall, but he took an interest in the stage partly because he understood that it was customary to begin a play with a scene between a butler and a parlormaid with a feather duster. He would have given something to see that. Miss Mary’s friend, Miss Katherine from Vassar, had promised to get him tickets some time on his night out, but that was the last he had heard of it. She was the one who had married the actor or whatever he was, something connected with the stage; Miss Mary had gone to the wedding. Hatton had never been partial to Miss Katherine; he did not see eye to eye with Forbes, who called her “the bonny lass.” Forbes would have changed her tune if she had seen what he had, coming downstairs one night, still tying his dressing-gown sash in his hurry and his bridgework not in, because the Madam had “heard a noise, Hatton. Please go and see.” For once, the Madam was right: there the two of them were, in the front hall, on the landing, the “bonny lass” and her “fiancé,” going right at it. Hatton had not liked the look of him at dinner. “Harald Petersen,” he was called, like some blasted Viking; Hatton had taken special notice of the spelling as he made out the place card. When Miss Katherine was going to get married, Miss Mary, Hatton recalled, had consulted him as to whether it would be possible for the young lady to have the use of the town house for the wedding, since the rest of the family, except Mr. Prothero, would already have gone down to the country. Bearing in mind what he had seen (“Just a bit of kissing,” Forbes said; did you do that on the floor with your skirts up and the “fiancé” planted on top of you for anybody from the street to see?), not to speak of the tickets, Hatton had said no, the furniture would be in dust covers, and it would upset the master, if he was staying in town that night, to find strangers in the house. “You’re a treasure, Hatton!” Miss Mary had proclaimed. Hatton had not been surprised to read in the paper this last summer that the play Mr. Petersen was with had closed, despite Miss Katherine’s telling them that it was going to run for years and years; since then, he had not seen the name in the theatrical columns, though he had observed in the real-estate notices that a Mr. and Mrs. Harold Peterson (sic) had taken an apartment in the East Fifties, near Sutton Place. That was them, said Miss Mary, who had been there only the other day. She had not had them to the house, though, since she had been up there at agricultural college; when she gave a dinner party nowadays, it was more for her own sort; she would just phone down to Hatton to have twelve covers and make up the list himself and to be sure and see to it that Miss Phyllis was not home for dinner that night. But if Miss Katherine and Mr. Petersen were ever asked again, Hatton had made a mental note to address her as “madam” when he opened the door. “Good evening, madam” (not “miss”), and a small, discreet smile; it was those little touches that counted. “He called me ‘madam’; isn’t that perfect?” Miss Katherine would whisper to her husband. “Hatton called me ‘madam,’ Pokey; what do you know?”

  Hatton turned to the front page, which he had saved for the last; he liked the sense of exercising his intellect which the world and general news gave him. A labor dispute had been occupying a small part of the front page for over a week; the waiters of the principal hotels were on strike. Hatton made it a point to take no sides in American politics; he believed that it was against the law for an alien to interfere in the domestic affairs of a foreign country and consequently refrained from having any thoughts on the subject. “Who would you vote for, Hatton?” Miss Katherine had asked him at the time of the last election, when she was staying in the house. “I am not an American citizen, miss,” Hatton had replied. Nevertheless, the waiters’ strike had enlisted his sympathies, to a certain degree, for they were his fellow-creatures, even if there was a gulf, a very wide gulf, between private service and what you might call common service. For a brief time, while he was getting his training, he had worked at a hotel in London. Hence, he had been following the strike news, and he knew from Cook’s Daily Mirror that something had happened last night at the Caven
dish—another demonstration.

  Now his grey eyes imperturbably widened; he shook the newspaper on his lap. When he had finished reading the item and turned to page five for the continuation, he refolded the paper back to page one, selected a blue pencil from his table and slowly drew a border around the story. His hands trembled slightly with suppressed excitement. Then he refolded the paper still again, into a shape that would fit onto a salver, which he would present to Mrs. Prothero at breakfast: “Beg pardon, madam; I thought this would interest Miss Mary.” He then mentally withdrew to the sideboard or, better, to the serving pantry, within earshot.