The Group (2 page)

You could have heard a pin drop, as the girls agreed later. Every girl was holding her breath. Dottie’s religious scruples had given way to a new anxiety, which was common to the whole group. The knowledge, shared by them all, of Kay’s having “lived with” Harald filled them with a sudden sense of the unsanctioned. They glanced stealthily around the chapel and noted for the nth time the absence of parents or
any older person
; and this departure from convention, which had been “such fun” before the service began, struck them now as queer and ominous. Even Elinor Eastlake, who knew scornfully well that fornication was not the type of impediment alluded to in the service, half expected an unknown presence to rise and stop the ceremony. To her mind, there was a spiritual obstacle to the marriage; she considered Kay a
cruel
,
ruthless
,
stupid
person who was marrying Harald from ambition.

Everyone in the chapel had now noticed something a little odd, or so it seemed, in the curate’s pauses and stresses; they had never heard “their marriage is not lawful” delivered with such emphasis. On the groom’s side, a handsome, auburn-haired, dissipated-looking young man clenched his fist suddenly and muttered something under his breath. He smelled terribly of alcohol and appeared extremely nervous; all through the ceremony, he had been clasping and unclasping his well-shaped, strong-looking hands and biting his chiseled lips. “He’s a painter; he’s just been divorced,” whispered fair-haired Polly Andrews, who was the quiet type but who knew everything, on Elinor Eastlake’s right. Elinor, like a young queen, leaned forward and deliberately caught his eye; here was someone, she felt, who was as disgusted and uncomfortable as she was. He responded with a stare of bitter, encompassing irony, followed by a wink directed, unmistakably, at the altar. Having moved into the main part of the service, the curate had now picked up speed, as though he had suddenly discovered another appointment and were running off this couple as rapidly as possible: this was only a $10 wedding, his manner seemed to imply. Behind her large hat, Kay appeared to be oblivious of all slights, but Harald’s ears and neck had turned a darker red, and, in his responses, he began, with a certain theatrical flourish, to slow down and correct the minister’s intonations.

This made the couple on the groom’s side smile, as if at a familiar weakness or fault, but the girls, in
their
pews, were scandalized by the curate’s rudeness and applauded what they called Harald’s victory over him, which they firmly intended to make the center of their congratulations after the ceremony. There were some who, then and there, resolved to speak to Mother and get her to speak to Dr. Reiland, the rector, about it; a capacity for outrage, their social birthright, had been redirected, as it were, by education. The fact that Kay and Harald were going to be poor as church mice was no excuse, they thought staunchly, for such conduct on the part of a priest, in these times especially, when everybody was having to retrench. Even among their own number, one girl had had to accept a scholarship to finish college, and nobody thought the worse of her for it: Polly Andrews remained one of their
very
dearest friends. They were a different breed, they could assure the curate, from the languid buds of the previous decade: there was not one of them who did not propose to work this coming fall, at a volunteer job if need be. Libby MacAusland had a promise from a publisher; Helena Davison, whose parents, out in Cincinnati, no, Cleveland, lived on the income of their income, was going into teaching—she already had a job sewed up at a private nursery school; Polly Andrews, more power to her, was to work as a technician in the new Medical Center; Dottie Renfrew was slated for social work in a Boston settlement house; Lakey was off to Paris to study art history, working toward an advanced degree; Pokey Prothero, who had been given a plane for graduation, was getting her pilot’s license so as to be able to commute three days a week to Cornell Agricultural School, and last but not least, yesterday little Priss Hartshorn, the group grind, had simultaneously announced her engagement to a young doctor and landed a job with the N.R.A. Not bad, they conceded, for a group that had gone through college with the stigma of being high-hat. And elsewhere in the class, in the wider circle of Kay’s friends, they could point out girls of perfectly good background who were going into business, anthropology, medicine, not because they had to, but because they knew they had something to contribute to our emergent America. The group was not afraid of being radical either; they could see the good Roosevelt was doing, despite what Mother and Dad said; they were not taken in by party labels and thought the Democrats should be given a chance to show what they had up their sleeve. Experience was just a question of learning through trial and error; the most conservative of them, pushed to the wall, admitted that an honest socialist was entitled to a hearing.

The worst fate, they utterly agreed, would be to become like Mother and Dad, stuffy and frightened. Not one of them, if she could help it, was going to marry a broker or a banker or a coldfish corporation lawyer, like so many of Mother’s generation. They would rather be wildly poor and live on salmon wiggle than be forced to marry one of those dull purplish young men of their own set, with a seat on the Exchange and bloodshot eyes, interested only in squash and cockfighting and drinking at the Racquet Club with his cronies, Yale or Princeton ’29. It would be better, yes, they were not afraid to say it, though Mother gently laughed, to marry a Jew if you loved him—some of them were awfully interesting and cultivated, though terribly ambitious and inclined to stick together, as you saw very well at Vassar: if you knew them you had to know their friends. There was one thing, though, truthfully, that made the group feel a little anxious for Kay. It was a pity in a way that a person as gifted as Harald and with a good education had had to pick the stage, rather than medicine or architecture or museum work, where the going was not so rough. To hear Kay talk, the theatre was pretty red in tooth and claw, though of course there were some nice people in it, like Katharine Cornell and Walter Hampden (he had a niece in the Class of ’32) and John Mason Brown, the thingummy, who talked to Mother’s club every year. Harald had done graduate work at the Yale Drama School, under Professor Baker, but then the depression had started, and he had had to come to New York to be a stage manager instead of just writing plays. That was like starting from the bottom in a factory, of course, which lots of nice boys were doing, and there was probably no difference between backstage in a theatre, where a lot of men in their undershirts sat in front of a mirror putting on make-up, and a blast furnace or a coal mine, where the men were in their undershirts too. Helena Davison said that when Harald’s show came to Cleveland this spring, he spent all his time playing poker with the stagehands and the electricians, who were the nicest people in the show, and Helena’s father said he agreed with him, especially after seeing the play—Mr. Davison was a bit of a card and more democratic than most fathers, being from the West and more or less self-made. Still, nobody could afford to be standoffish nowadays. Connie Storey’s fiancé, who was going into journalism, was working as an office boy at
Fortune
, and her family, instead of having conniptions, was taking it very calmly and sending her to cooking school. And lots of graduate architects, instead of joining a firm and building rich men’s houses, had gone right into the factories to study industrial design. Look at Russel Wright, whom everybody thought quite the thing now; he was using industrial materials, like the wonderful new spun aluminum, to make all sorts of useful objects like cheese trays and water carafes. Kay’s first wedding present, which she had picked out herself, was a Russel Wright cocktail shaker in the shape of a skyscraper and made out of oak ply and aluminum with a tray and twelve little round cups to match—light as a feather and non-tarnishable, of course. The main point was, Harald was a natural gentleman—though inclined to show off in his letters, which was probably to impress Kay, who was inclined to drop names herself and talk about people’s butlers and Fly and A.D. and Porcellian and introduce poor Harald as a Yale man when he had only gone to graduate school at New Haven. …That was a side of Kay that the group did its best to deprecate and that drove Lakey wild. A lack of fastidiousness and consideration for the other person; she did not seem to realize the little social nuances. She was always coming into people’s rooms, for instance, and making herself at home and fiddling with things on their bureaus and telling them about their inhibitions if they objected; it was she who insisted on playing Truth and on getting everybody in the group to make lists of their friends in the order of preference and then compare the lists. What she did not stop to think about was that somebody had to be on the bottom of every list, and when that somebody cried and refused to be consoled, Kay was always honestly surprised;
she
would not mind, she said, hearing the truth about herself. Actually, she never did hear it because the others were too tactful ever to put her at the bottom, even if they wanted to, because Kay was a little bit of an outsider and nobody wanted her to feel that. So instead they would put Libby MacAusland or Polly Andrews—someone they had known all their lives or gone to school with or something. Kay did get a bit of a shock, though, to find that she was not at the top of Lakey’s list. She was crazy about Lakey, whom she always described as her best friend. Kay did not know it, but the group had had a pitched battle with Lakey over Easter vacation, when they had drawn straws to see who was to invite Kay home for the holidays and Lakey had got the shortest straw and then refused to play. The group had simply borne down on Lakey in a body and accused her of being a poor sport, which was true. After all, as they had swiftly pointed out to her, it was she who had invited Kay to group with them in the first place; when they saw that they could get the South Tower for themselves if they had eight in the group instead of six, it was Lakey’s idea that they should invite Kay and Helena Davison to join forces with them and take the two small single rooms.

If you were going to use a person, then you had to make the best of them. And it was not “using,” anyway; they all liked Kay and Helena, including Lakey herself, who had discovered Kay as a sophomore, when they were both on the Daisy Chain. She had taken Kay up for all she was worth, because Kay, as she said, was “malleable” and “capable of learning.” Now she claimed to have detected that Kay had feet of clay, which was rather a contradiction, since wasn’t clay malleable? But Lakey was very contradictory; that was her charm. Sometimes she was a frightful snob and sometimes just the opposite. She was looking so furious this morning, for instance, because Kay, according to her, should have got married quietly in City Hall instead of making Harald, who was not to the manor born, try to carry off a wedding in J. P. Morgan’s church. Now was this snobbish of Lakey or wasn’t it? Naturally, she had not said any of this to Kay; she had expected Kay to feel it for herself, which was just what Kay couldn’t do and remain the blunt, natural, unconscious Kay they all loved, in spite of her faults. Lakey had the weirdest ideas about people. She had got the bee in her bonnet, last fall, that Kay had worked her way into the group out of a desire for social prestige; this was not at all the way it had happened, and it was a peculiar thing, really, to think about a girl who was so unconventional that she had not even bothered to have her own parents to her wedding, though her father was very prominent in Salt Lake City affairs.

It was true, Kay had rather angled to get Pokey Prothero’s town house for the reception, but she had taken it with good grace when Pokey had loudly lamented that the house was in dust covers for the summer, with only a caretaking couple to look after Father on the nights he spent in town. Poor Kay—some of the girls thought that Pokey might have been a little more generous and offered her a card to the Colony. In fact, on this score, nearly all the group felt a little bit conscience-stricken. Each one of them, as the others knew, had a house or a big apartment or a club membership, if it was only the Cosmopolitan, or a cousin’s digs or a brother’s that might possibly have been put at Kay’s disposal. But that would have meant punch, champagne, a cake from Sherry’s or Henri’s, extra help—before one knew it one would have found oneself giving the wedding and supplying a father or a brother to take Kay down the aisle. In these times, in sheer self-protection, one had to think twice, as Mother said, fatigued; there were so many demands. Fortunately, Kay had decided that she and Harald should give the wedding breakfast themselves, at the old Hotel Brevoort down on Eighth Street: so much nicer, so much more appropriate.

Dottie Renfrew and Elinor Eastlake made their way out of the chapel together, onto the sunny pavement. The service had seemed awfully short. There had been no blessing of the ring and “Who giveth this Woman” had had to be left out, obviously. Dottie frowned and cleared her throat. “Wouldn’t you have thought,” she dared to suggest, in her deep military rumble, “that she would have had
someone
? Isn’t there a cousin in Montclair?” Elinor Eastlake shrugged. “The plan miscarried,” she said. Libby MacAusland, an English major from Pittsfield, thrust her head into the tête-á-tête. “What’s this, what’s this?” she said jovially. “Break it up, girls.” She was a tall, pretty blonde with perpetually dilating brown eyes, a long, arching, inquisitive neck, and a manner of anxious conviviality; she had been president of the class sophomore year and had just missed being elected president of Students. Dottie laid a cautionary hand on Lakey’s silken elbow; Libby, as everyone knew, was an unrestrained gossip and gabbler. Lakey lightly shook off Dottie’s fingers; she detested being touched. “Dottie was asking,” she said distinctly, “whether there wasn’t a cousin in Montclair.” There was a faint smile in the depths of her green eyes, which had a queer dark-blue rim around the iris, a sign of her Indian blood; she was searching the distance for a taxi. Libby became exaggeratedly thoughtful. She laid a finger to the center of her forehead. “I believe there is,” she discovered, nodding three times. “Do you really think—?” she began eagerly. Lakey raised a hand for a taxi. “Kay kept the cousin in the background, hoping that one of us would supply her with something better.” “Lakey!” murmured Dottie, shaking her head in reproach. “Really, Lakey,” said Libby, giggling. “Nobody but you would ever think of such a thing.” She hesitated. “If Kay wanted somebody to give her away, she had only to ask, after all. Father or Brother would have been glad, any of us would have been glad. …” Her voice broke off, and she precipitated her thin form into the taxi, where she took the jump seat, turning around, in half a minute, to survey her friends with cupped chin and brooding eyes: all her movements were quick and restive—she had an image of herself as a high-bred, tempestuous creature, a sort of Arab steed in an English sporting primitive. “Do you really think?” she repeated, covetously, biting her upper lip. But Lakey said no more; she never enlarged on a suggestion, and for this had been named the Mona Lisa of the Smoking Room. Dottie Renfrew was distressed; her gloved hand twisted the pearls that had been given her for her twenty-first birthday. Her conscience was troubling her, and she resorted, from habit, to the slow, soft cough, like a perpetual scruple, that caused her family such anxiety and made them send her to Florida twice a year, at Christmas and Easter. “Lakey,” she said gravely, ignoring Libby, “one of us, don’t you think, should have done it for her?” Libby MacAusland caracoled about on the jump seat, a hungry look in her eyes. Both girls stared into Elinor’s impassive oval face. Elinor’s eyes narrowed; she fingered the coil of Indian-black hair at the nape of her neck and readjusted a hairpin. “No,” she said, with contempt. “It would have been a confession of weakness.”