The Group

by Mary McCarthy

  “You’re unwilling to make a sacrifice,” Mrs. Renfrew said sorrowfully, her head commencing to tremble again. “Not even to wait a month to keep from hurting a man who isn’t in his first youth. You’re unwilling to sacrifice your pride to see ‘Dick’ again and live with him, if you love him, and try to reform him. Women in my day, women of all sorts, were willing to make sacrifices for love, or for some ideal, like the vote or Lucy Stonerism. They got themselves put out of hotels for registering as ‘Miss’ and ‘Mr.’ when they were legally married. Look at your teachers, look what they gave up. Or at women doctors and social workers.” “That was your day, Mother,” Dottie said patiently. “Sacrifices aren’t necessary any more. Nobody has to choose between getting married and being a teacher. If they ever did. It was the homeliest members of your class who became teachers—admit it. And everybody knows, Mother, that you can’t reform a man; he’ll just drag you down too. I’ve thought about this a lot, out West. Sacrifice is a dated idea. A superstition, really, Mother, like burning widows in India. What society is aiming at now is the full development of the individual.”

  “Oh, I agree; I quite agree,” said Mrs. Renfrew. “And yet it’s such a little thing I’m asking of you, Dottie. Bear with your Aged P.” She put in this family joke in a nervous conciliatory manner. “It isn’t necessary, Mother. I truly do know my mind. Because I slept with Dick doesn’t mean I should change my whole life. He feels the same way himself. You can fit things into their compartments. He initiated me, and I’ll always be grateful to him for making it so wonderful. But if I saw him again, it might not be so wonderful. I’d get involved. …It’s better to keep it as a memory. Besides, he doesn’t want my love. That’s what I was thinking about when you were in the bathroom. I can’t throw myself at him.” “It often works,” said Mrs. Renfrew, smiling. “Men—unhappy, lonely men, particularly—” she continued gravely, “respond to a faithful heart. An unswerving faith, Dottie, moves mountains; you should have learned that from your religion. ‘Whither thou goest I will go. …’” Dottie shook her dark head. “You try sitting in the Common, Mother, with a douche bag and whatnot on your lap. And anyway you don’t really want me to live with him either. You’re only talking, because you want me to ‘pay the price.’ Postpone my wedding and upset everybody’s plans, just to allow a ‘decent interval’ to elapse. Of mourning for Dick. Isn’t it true?” A faint teasing smile came into her brown eyes as she interrogated her mother.

  Mrs. Renfrew considered the accusation. It was true, she had to confess, that she did not want Dottie to “live with” Dick. But she would want Dottie to want to do it. Yet how to express this? Perhaps Dottie was right, and she was only being conventional in wishing to postpone the marriage. It might be the conventional Bostonian in her that felt that Dottie ought to make some gesture toward the past. Yet was this enough to account for the deep sad sense of disappointment she had—disappointment in Dottie? It seemed to her, looking at it as charitably as she could, that Dottie was being tempted by Brook’s wealth and by the glorious outdoor life he had to offer her, of which she had painted such a vivid unforgettable picture—the desert and the silver mines and the pack trips into the mountains. “You were ‘just talking’ yourself, Dottie,” she chided, “when you said you loved Dick. I was only going by what you told me. I don’t believe you do love him. But I think you like to say so. Because if you didn’t you would be too shamed and degraded.” “Please, Mother!” said Dottie haughtily. Mrs. Renfrew turned away. “Try to get some rest,” she said. “I’m going to lie down myself.” There were tears in her bright-blue eyes as she lay on her chaise longue, which faced the window, hung with pretty Swiss-embroidered curtains, overlooking Chestnut Street. She had certainly not married Sam Renfrew for money or for what they called “security” nowadays, and yet she felt as if she had and as if some dreadful pattern were being repeated in Dottie. Had she and Sam given Dottie false values, despite all their efforts to the contrary? She and Sam had married for love, and there had never been anyone before him, and yet she felt as if, long ago, she had had a lover whom she had given up for this house and the State Street Trust and the golf and the Chilton Club, and it was all being visited on Dottie or on that poor man out in Arizona. The sins of the fathers. This was all perfect stuff, she knew, and Dottie, she supposed, might learn to love Brook, especially since her senses seemed to have been awakened; that, at least, was the positive side of all this sad affair—or could be, if Brook were careful. The Arizona climate, too, was “just what the doctor ordered” for Dottie. A few tears, nevertheless, rolled out of one eye, and she stanched them with the handkerchief of fine Irish linen and lace old Margaret had given her for Christmas. An idea of a lost lover, of someone renounced, tapped at her memory like a woodpecker. Whom could she be thinking of, she asked herself demurely. The matrimonial submarine?

  Eight

  LIBBY MACAUSLAND HAD A spiffy apartment in the Village. Her family in Pittsfield was helping her pay the rent. The job she had been promised by a publisher, just before graduation, had not exactly materialized. The man she had interviewed, who was one of the partners in the firm, had shown her around the offices, given her some books they published, and introduced her to an editor, who was smoking a pipe in his sanctum. Mr. LeRoy, a portly young man with a dark mustache and bushy eyebrows, had been very forthcoming as long as the partner was there, but afterward, instead of settling her at a desk right away (Libby had spied an empty cubbyhole in the editorial department), he had told her to come back in a week or so. Then he said he was going to give her manuscripts to read at home to try her out. They paid $5 apiece for reading a manuscript and writing a summary and an opinion, and she ought to be able, he thought, to do three a week, which was the same as having a half-time job—better. “If we started you in the office,” he said, “we could only give you $25 full time. And you’d have your carfare and your lunches to pay.” When he asked her if she needed the work, Libby had let on that she did; she thought if he thought she was pretty desperate he would find her more manuscripts to read.

  Anyway, that ought not to have been his business. Her background was perfect for a berth in publishing: fluent reading knowledge of French and Italian; copy editing, proofreading, and dummying as editor in chief of the Vassar literary magazine; short-story and verse-writing courses; good command of typing—all the tools of the trade. But mindful of the competition, Libby took special pains with her reports for Mr. LeRoy, typing them triple-spaced on a kind of sky-blue typing paper that was still manufactured in one of the mills in Pittsfield and stapling them in stiff blue covers. The “presentation” of her themes had been outstanding at Vassar. She always added a title page with a colophon—her device, the same she used for her bookplate—to her weekly papers and put them between covers; her handwriting was distinctive, with Greek e’s and embellished capitals. Miss Kitchel had noticed her immediately in English 105 as “the artistic young lady with the fine Italian hand.” Her “effusions,” as Miss Kitchel, who was a hearty soul, used to call them, had been printed in the freshman Sampler, and she had been invited, while still a freshman, to serve on the board of the literary magazine. Libby’s forte was descriptive writing. “This hopeful beauty did create” (Carew) was the motto beneath her picture in the yearbook.

  Her mother’s sister had a villa in Fiesole, and Libby had spent a year there as a child, going to the sweetest dame school in Florence, and countless summers afterward—to be exact, two; Libby was prone to exaggerate. She spoke a breathless Italian, with a nifty Tuscan accent, and had been dying to take her junior year abroad, at the University of Bologna, for she had read a fascinating novel called The Lady of Laws, about a learned lady in Renaissance times who had been a doctor of law at Bologna and got raped and carried off by one of the Malatestas (Libby had been an alternate in a debate on censorship with Wesleyan freshman year). But she had misdoubted that being a year away from college might cost her the “crown” she coveted; she counted on being elected President
of Students.

  Libby played basketball (center) and had a big following among the dimmer bulbs of the class; she was president of the Circolo Italiano and had been president of the class sophomore year. She was also active in the Community Church. But running for President of Students, she had been mowed down, as it turned out, by the big guns of the North Tower group, who were more the hockey-playing, ground-gripper, rah-rah Vassar sort and carried off all the class offices senior year. They had asked her to group with them at the end of freshman year, but she had thought Lakey’s crowd was snazzier. Came the dawn when Lakey and the others would not even electioneer for her.

  It seemed to be Libby’s fate (so far) to start out strong with people and then have them lose interest for no reason she could see—“They flee from me that some time did me seek.” That had happened with the group. Libby adored Of Human Bondage and Katherine Mansfield and Edna Millay and Elinor Wylie and quite a lot of Virginia Woolf, but she could never get anybody to talk with her about books any more, because Lakey said her taste was sentimental. The paradox was that she was the most popular member of the group outside and the least popular inside. For instance, she had put Helena, who was one to hide her light under a bushel, on the board of the literary magazine; then Helena had blandly turned around and sided with a minority that wanted to print “experimental literature.” She and the arch-enemy, Norine Schmittlapp, had collaborated on an “Open Letter to the Editor,” claiming that the college magazine no longer represented Vassar writing but had become the inheritance of a “pallid” literary clique. Libby, counseled by the faculty, had let herself run with the current and printed an “experimental number”; the tide turned her way when one of the poems in it proved to be a hoax, written by a cute freshman as a spoof on modern poetry. But in the very next issue a story she had battled for was discovered to be plagiarized, word for word, from a story in Harper’s. It was hushed up, for the sake of the girl’s future, after the Dean had had a talk with Harper’s about it, but someone (probably Kay) whom Libby had told in strictest confidence betrayed her, and soon the rebel clique was busy spreading the news. It was one thing, they said, to be generously taken in by a hoax and another to print as original writing an un-adventurous theft from a stale, second-rate magazine. Libby literally could not understand this last part; one of her highest ambitions was to have a story or a poem published by Harper’s. And lo and behold, hold your hats, girls, it had happened to her finally a year ago this last winter.

  She had been in New York nearly two years now, living first with two other girls from Pittsfield in Tudor City and now alone, in this spiffy apartment she had found. She was avid for success, and her parents were willing; Brother was settled, at long last, in a job in the mill, and Sister had married a Harkness. So Libby was free to try her pinions.

  Mr. LeRoy had given her stacks of manuscripts to start out with. She had had to buy a ladies’ briefcase at Mark Cross to lug them all back and forth—black calf, very snazzy. “You’re made, Libby!” her roommates in Tudor City used to gasp when they saw her stagger in with her load. And to pile Pelion on Ossa, she had got herself some book-review assignments from the Saturday Review of Literature and the Herald Tribune Books—no less. Her roommates were green with envy because they were only going to Katharine Gibbs Secretarial School themselves. Her family was jubilant; that was why they had let her have the apartment. Libby was obviously dedicated to the idea of a literary career, as Brother reported to headquarters when he came home from a visit to New York. Father had had her first check photostated and framed for her, and it hung above her desk, with a little branch of laurel from the parental garden, to show that she was crowned with bays.

  The idea of the book reviews was completely Mr. LeRoy’s. “You might try for some reviewing,” he said to her one day when she wanted to know how she could get ahead faster. So with that flea in her ear, she had gone to Miss Amy Loveman and Mrs. Van Doren (Irita, the wife of Carl), and they had both let her have a chance. She still had the New York Times to crack.

  Most of the manuscripts Mr. LeRoy gave her were novels; biographies (which Libby doted on) he kept for specialists, and he had not yet tried her on a French or an Italian book—she was too much of a tyro, she supposed. Libby wrote exhaustive plot summaries, for she did not want the whole burden of decision to rest on her, and she labored far into the night on her critical exegeses, making constructive suggestions. She was eager to get into editing, which was the more glamorous part of publishing—not just copy editing, but creative rewriting. She tried to read creatively too, making believe she was a housewife in Darien or a homely secretary when she sat in the seat of judgment. It stood to reason, she argued, that publishers were in business to reach the public and not to please Libby MacAusland. So she tried to look on every novel as a potential best seller. That was what the editor of the Herald Tribune Books thought too; she had told Libby, in the sweetest Southern accent: “We believe here, Miss MacAuslan’, that there’s something good in evvra book that should be brought to the attention of evvra reader.”

  Yet Mr. LeRoy had begun to eye her reflectively when she brought in her reports. It could not be her clothes; she made it a point to dress the way she imagined a publisher’s reader should: neat but not gaudy, in a plain skirt and shirtwaist, with sometimes a pleated front or an old cameo brooch of Great Grandmother Ireton’s at the throat—general effect a smitch Victorian, like an “operative” in a Howells novel (Libby loved old words). If she ever got a regular job in an office, she was going to pin paper cuffs over her real ones. On cold days she wore a sweater and skirt with some gold beads or her pearls, which were not Oriental, only cultured, but as far as Mr. LeRoy could tell they might have come from the five-and-ten. It must be something about her reports, she was afraid. He dropped a hint once that she need not go to quite such length in describing a novel that she was turning thumbs down on. But she said she was only too happy to do the job right; the laborer must be worthy of his hire.

  She often found him reading a magazine: the New Masses, she noticed, or another one called Anvil or still another with the peculiar name of Partisan Review, which she had tried to read in the Washington Square Bookshop. That was what gave her the idea of slipping words like “laborer” into her conversation, to remind him that she too was one of the downtrodden. Rumor had it that there were quite a few pinks in the publishing biz. Be that as it might, Mr. LeRoy was no Lord Chesterfield, sitting there in his shirt sleeves, phlegmatic and rather porky, tipping back in his desk chair, rubbing his mustache, and Libby sometimes got the feeling that he was not used to feminine women. She had a way of tilting her head to one side and thrusting her chin forward eagerly, with lips slightly parted, like one listening to music, that seemed to embarrass him, for whenever she did this he would stop in the middle of a sentence and frown and wring his eyebrows.

  “You don’t need to read them all though,” he observed to her suddenly one day, balancing her blue folder on two fingers and puffing at his pipe. “Some publishers’ readers just smell ’em.” Libby shook her gold head in its navy beret emphatically. “I don’t mind, dear sir,” she cried. “And I’d like to scotch the legend that manuscripts aren’t read by publishers. You can swear on the Book these have been. And you can’t object if I’m doing it on my own time.”

  He got up from behind the desk and began to walk around with his pipe. “If you’re seriously trying to make a living out of this, Miss MacAusland,” he said, “you must treat it as piece work and rationalize your time like any sweated worker.” “Don’t call me ‘sweated,’” she smiled. “Odo-Ro-No.” He did not smile back. “Seriously,” she went on, “I love doing it. I’m one of those unhappy few mortals that can’t put down a novel till I know how it comes out. Words cast a spell on me. Even the worst words in the worst order. I write myself, you know.” “Write us a novel,” he proposed abruptly. “You write damned well.” Libby lit herself a cigarette. She said to herself warily that she must not let him deflect her by
flattery into a writing career. “I’m not ready for that yet. Construction is my fatal weakness. But I’m learning. Reading these manuscripts has taught me a lot. When my day comes and I open up the old Remington and type ‘CHAPTER ONE,’ I’ll profit from their mistakes.” He went back to his desk and knocked out his pipe. “You do it on your own time, as you say, Miss MacAusland. But the function of the first reader is to save the second reader’s time. And his own. What you’re doing is uneconomic.” “But I have to make the work interesting to myself,” Libby protested. “All work ought to be interesting. Even manual labor. Hear, hear!” she added jovially, in the manner she had learned at Vassar. “Sound of falling bricks,” she muttered, when Mr. LeRoy remained silent.

  Libby punched out her cigarette. She usually made it a policy to stay fifteen minutes, as if she were paying a call, but it was hard work, often, with Mr. LeRoy to stretch the visit that long. Now came the moment she dreaded. Some men in offices stood up to indicate that the interview was over, but Mr. LeRoy stayed seated at his desk or else he was pacing around restlessly anyway. He sometimes acted as if he had forgotten what she had come for, which was to get a fresh supply of manuscripts. He would let her put her coat and gloves on without seeming to notice that she was ready to make her adieux and without a single glance at the desk drawer where, she had discovered, the incoming manuscripts were kept. It was a big drawer, like a bin; lowering herself to pun, Libby called it the loony bin, because the suspense of waiting each time for him to open it drove her crazy. Sometimes she had to remind him, but generally she found that if she waited long enough he remembered. Each time, though, she felt her whole career hanging by a thread for what was probably only a minute by the clock but, measured by her heart’s beat, eternity. Finally he would fish out a couple of manuscripts and toss them on the desk. “Here, have a look at these.” Or, peering into the drawer, “There doesn’t seem to be much here this week, Miss MacAusland,” he would say, coughing. When Libby, arching her neck, could see that the drawer was practically full. Some day, she feared—and she used to tell it to herself as a story—the drawer would remain closed. She would put on her coat (simple navy blue with a velvet collar) and go out into the wintry streets with her empty briefcase; after that, she could never see Mr. LeRoy again—her pride would not let her.