The Group (29 page)

“And your opinion,” said Libby, “is that I’m just one of those. Those anonymous hordes.” “You’re more persevering,” he said, with a glance at his watch and a sigh. “And you say your family isn’t supporting you. Which makes your perseverance more redoubtable. And you do seem to have some eerie relation to literature. I wish you luck.” And with that, he was standing up and vigorously shaking her hand across the desk. Her lighted cigarette dropped on the rug. “Oh, my cigarette! Oh, horrors!” she cried. “Where is it?” “Never mind,” he said. “We’ll find it. Miss Bisbee!” he called, to his secretary, who promptly poked her head in the open doorway. “There’s a lighted cigarette in here somewhere. Find it, will you? And see that Miss MacAusland gets her check in the mail.” He grabbed up Libby’s coat and held it for her; the secretary was on her hands and knees scrabbling around the floor; Libby’s head was reeling with the shock and confusion. She took a step backward and, girls, can you imagine it, she fainted kerplunk into Mr. LeRoy’s arms!

It must have been the overheated office. Mr. LeRoy’s secretary told her afterward that she had turned quite green and the cold sweat had been standing out on her forehead. Just like the summer day her aunt was with her when she passed out cold in the Uffizi in front of “The Birth of Venus.” But Gus LeRoy (short for Augustus) was convinced it was because she was hungry—she confessed she had not eaten any lunch. He insisted on giving her $10 out of his own pocket and a dollar for a taxi besides. Then the next morning he rang her up and told her to go to see this literary agent who needed an assistant. So that now, lo and behold, she had this snazzy job at $25 a week, reading manuscripts and writing to authors and having lunch with editors. She and Gus LeRoy were the best of friends; he was married after all, she learned from her boss.

Nine

G
US LEROY MET POLLY
Andrews at a party given by Libby in May the following year. It was 1936, and half the group were married. Of the old crowd, Libby had invited only Priss, who couldn’t come, and Polly and Kay; the others, she had rather lost sight of. She was serving a May
bowle
, made of Liebfraumilch and fresh strawberries and sweet woodruff. There was a special store where you could get the woodruff, dried and imported from Germany; it was over on Second Avenue, under the El, a dusty old German firm with apothecary jars and old apothecaries’ scales and mortars and pestles in the window. Polly could not possibly miss it, Libby said on the phone; it was right around the corner from where she lived, and she could stop and get the woodruff for Libby any day on her way home from work. If she brought it the day before the party, that would be in plenty of time; it only had to steep overnight. Polly worked as a technician at Cornell Medical Center, giving basal metabolism tests chiefly, which meant that she had to be at the hospital the first thing in the morning, when the patients woke up. But she got off early in the afternoons, which Libby didn’t, and took the Second Avenue El home quite often—she lived on Tenth Street, near St. Mark’s Place, almost catercorner from St. Mark’s-in-the-Bouwerie, where the rector, Dr. Guthrie, had such beautiful liturgy, though Polly never took advantage of it and slept Sunday mornings.

The herbal firm was nine blocks from Polly’s place; trust Polly, who could be prickly in her mild, smiling, obstinate way, to let that transpire when she appeared with the woodruff at Libby’s apartment. But they were nine short blocks, dear, Libby retorted, and Polly could use the fresh air and exercise. When she heard Polly’s description of the shop’s display of pharmacopoeia—all the old herbs and simples and materia medica in big stoppered glass jars with the Latin names written in crabbed Gothic lettering—she was sorry she had not gone herself, in a taxi. But to reward Polly for her pains, Libby had taken them both out to dinner at a new place in the Village, and afterward they had come back to the apartment and got the
bowle
started and everything organized for the party. Polly had a passion for flowers (she did wonders that evening with Libby’s mountain dogwood), and she was efficient in the kitchen. Libby had persuaded her to make Mr. Andrews’ famous chicken-liver
pâté
, a receipt he had brought back from France, and, having splurged on chicken livers at the market, she stood by watching Polly
sauter
them and laboriously push them through a sieve. “Aren’t you doing them too rare?” she suggested. “Kay says
she
always cooks everything fifteen minutes longer than the recipe calls for.” Libby was scandalized by the amount of fresh print butter Polly mixed in afterward,
plus
brandy and sherry—no wonder the Andrews family was insolvent. But Polly was sweet to do it and tenacious about having her own way, once she started on something. All the Andrews were like that. Mr. Andrews, Polly said, clung to making his own stock and boiling it down for the glaze, but Polly consented to use Campbell’s consommé to line the mold, thank Heaven; otherwise, they would have been up till dawn. As it was, Libby was completely exhausted by the time Polly left. Just pushing those livers through a sieve had taken nearly an hour. She would not hear of Polly’s washing up; a colored maid was coming the next afternoon to clean and serve at the party.

Fortunately, Polly could take the Eighth Street bus home; it was a long walk from Libby’s place, just west of Fifth Avenue, and you had to pass some pretty sinister lofts and warehouses. Polly’s apartment, though in a fairly decent block, was not as attractive as Libby’s, which had high ceilings and a fireplace and windows almost down to the floor. In fact, it was flattery to call Polly’s an apartment. It was really a furnished room and bath, with a studio bed, which Polly had covered with a pretty patchwork quilt from home, and some worn Victorian chairs and a funny old marble-topped table with lion’s-claw feet, and a two-burner hot plate and some shelves covered with bright-blue oilcloth in one white-curtained-off corner, and an icebox that leaked. At least it was clean; the family were professional people (actually, the wife was Vassar, Class of ’18), and Polly had made friends with the other lodgers—two refugees, one a white Russian and the other a German-Jewish socialist—and always had funny stories to tell about them and their violent discussions. Polly was a sympathetic soul; everybody she met told her their troubles and probably borrowed money from her. Yet, poor girl, her family could not afford to send her a cent. Her Aunt Julia, who lived on Park and Seventy-second, had given her some china and a chafing dish, but she did not realize how the other half lived; for one thing, she had heart trouble and could not climb Polly’s stairs. In her day, St. Mark’s Place had been a nice neighborhood, and she did not know that things had changed. Still, Polly’s apartment would be perfectly suitable if she did not have this habit of letting herself be imposed on by strangers. The German-Jewish man, for instance, Mr. Schneider, was constantly bringing her little presents, colored marzipan in the shape of fruits (once he brought her a marzipan hot dog, which for some reason delighted Polly), chocolate-covered ginger, a tiny pot with a St. Patrick’s Day shamrock, and in return Polly was helping him with his English, so that he could get a better job. This meant that almost every evening he was tapping at her door. Libby had met him one night—a dwarf, practically, with frizzy grey hair in a mop and a thick accent but old enough (Libby was glad to see) to be Polly’s father, if Mr. Andrews had not been almost old enough himself to be her grandfather. You found the most curious visitors at Polly’s, most of them ancient as the hills: Ross, her Aunt Julia’s maid, who you had to admit was a sketch, sitting there doing her knitting, having brought Polly some lamb chops from her aunt’s butcher on Park Avenue; the White Russian, poor devil, who liked to play chess with Polly; the iceman. Well, that was a bit exaggerated, but Polly did have an awfully funny story about the Italian iceman, a veritable troglodyte, coming in one day with the ice on his shoulder this last March and saying “Tacks” over and over and Polly offering him thumbtacks and him shaking his head saying “No, no, lady;
tacks!”;
it turned out, believe it or not, that he was having trouble with his income-tax return, which he whipped out of his back pocket with his horny hand—only Polly would have an iceman who paid income tax. Naturally, she sat down and helped him with the arithmetic and his business deductions and dependents. Yet when one of her friends asked something of her, she might suddenly flush up and say, “Libby, you can perfectly well do that yourself.”

To look at, she was one of those “gentle ray of sunshine” girls—very fair, with almost flaxen hair, the color of pale straw or rough raw silk, big blue eyes, and milk-white skin, bluish, like skim milk; she had a soft, plump chin with a sort of dimple or cleft in it, plump white arms, and a wide, open brow. Some people thought she looked like Ann Harding in the movies, but she was not as tall as Ann Harding. She had taken to wearing her hair in braids around her broad head; she thought it was neater, for the hospital, all coiled around like that. The trouble was, it made her look older. When Priss was having her last miscarriage, in New York Hospital, in semi-private, Polly had stopped in to visit her every day, which was easy for
her
since she worked there; seeing her in her white coat and low-heeled shoes and those matronly braids, the other patient thought Polly must be at least twenty-six. She had been on the Daisy Chain (that made four in the group—Libby herself, Lakey, Kay, and Polly—which was sort of a record), but Libby had never agreed that Polly was beautiful. She was too placid and colorless, unless she smiled. Kay had cast her as the Virgin in the Christmas pantomime senior year, which she directed, but this was to give her a pickup from having broken her engagement to the boy with the bad heredity. Actually, behind that placid exterior, Polly was rather emotional but very good fun, really a delightful companion, with an original point of view. All the Andrews were original. Polly had majored in Chemistry, thinking that she might be a doctor, but when Mr. Andrews lost his money, naturally she had to give that up; luckily, the college Vocational Bureau had got her placed at New York Hospital-Cornell Medical Center. All the group hoped she would meet some ravishing young doctor or pathologist who would want to marry her, but so far this had not happened or if so no one knew about it. About herself, Polly was very reserved. It sometimes sounded as if she saw nobody but her aunt and those strange inhabitants of her rooming house and other girls with jobs, some of them pretty dreary—the type, as Kay said, that had bulbs of paper narcissuses growing in their windows in a dish from the five-and-ten. This capacity for making lackluster friends, especially of her own sex, was Polly’s
faiblesse
. The Chem majors at college were a case in point, worthy souls, no doubt, but the science majors as a group (credit Kay for this observation too) were about the lowest stratum at Vassar. They were the ones, as Kay said, you would not remember when you came back for your tenth reunion: pathetic cases with skin trouble and superfluous hair and thick glasses and overweight or underweight problems and names like Miss Hasenpfeffer. What would happen to them afterward? Would they all go home and become pillars of their community and send their daughters back to Vassar to perpetuate the type or would they go into teaching or medicine, where you might even hear of them some day? “Dr. Elfrida Katzenbach is with the Rockefeller Institute—Congratulations, Katzy,” you would read in the alumnae news and “Who was she?” you would ask yourself. Astronomy and Zoology were a little different—Pokey had majored in Zoology and, would wonders never cease incidentally, last year she had up and married a poet, a sort of distant cousin who was in Graduate School at Princeton—her family had bought them a house down there, but Pokey still commuted by plane to Ithaca and was still planning to be a vet. Anyway, Astronomy and Zoology were different—not so dry, more descriptive; Botany too. Next to the Physics and Chem majors in dreariness came the language majors; Libby had narrowly escaped that fate. They were all going to be French or Spanish teachers in the high school back home and had names like Miss Peltier and Miss La Gasa. Polly had her followers among them too, who were even invited up to stay in Stock-bridge, to talk French with Mr. Andrews. Polly was a democrat (all the Andrews voted for Roosevelt, being related to the Delanos), though Lakey used to say that the democracy was all on the surface and that underneath Polly was a feudal snob.

Be that as it might, Libby saw Polly as often as she could and almost always asked her to her parties. The trouble was, Polly, though wonderful company when you were alone with her, did not shine at big gatherings. Her voice was very low, like her father’s, who virtually whispered his mild remarks. If you did not explain her family background (a nest of gentlefolk with a few bats in the belfry; Mr. Andrews’ sisters had all been painted by Sargent), people were inclined to overlook her or ask after she had gone home who that quiet blonde girl was. That was another thing; she always left early unless you gave her something to do, like talking to a bore, to make her feel useful. All you had to do was tell her to go rescue some stick who was standing in a corner, and Polly would engage him in animated conversation and find out all sorts of wondrous things about him that nobody had ever suspected. But if you told her someone was a great catch, she would not make the slightest effort—“I’m afraid I must make my excuses, Libby” (all the Andrews talked like that).

But the minute you started a game, be it poker or “Pin the Tail on the Donkey,” Polly was in her element, delighted to sort chips or cut out pieces of paper or make blindfolds; she was always the court of authority or the umpire—the person who decided the rules and kept everybody in order. That was the Andrews family again. Having lost their money and had so much trouble, they kept cheerful by doing charades and playing games. Anybody who stayed with them in that rambling old farmhouse, with its big fireplaces and attics and storerooms, was immediately drafted to be “It” after dinner and hastily told all the rules, and woe to him or her who was not quick to catch on. Some nights they did charades, very complicated ones, in costumes in the barn with kerosene stoves to keep warm. Some nights they played “Murder,” though that made Mr. Andrews very nervous, they discovered, for it seemed he had had violent spells in the hospital and trembled if he had to do the carving at the table on one of his darker days. Some nights they played “
Cache-Cache
” which was just the French version of good old “Hide and Seek” with slightly different rules that they had learned in their chateau in France. Or “Ghosts,” which the family had renamed “Punkin” because Mr. Andrews sometimes burst into quiet tears or laughed strangely when he missed a question and had to say “I’m one-third of a ghost”; so now instead they said “one-third of a punkin,” after “pumpkin head.” Then they played “Geography,” which Mr. Andrews was a perfect fiend at, having traveled so much and knowing all the Y’s and K’s like Ypres, which he called “Wipers,” and Yezd and Kyoto and Knossos. And a new version of “Ghosts” that they called the “Wily Austrian Diplomat” game (“Are you a wily Austrian diplomat?” “No, I am not Metternich”). Polly’s family, being brainy, liked these guessing games almost best, next to charades, but they played silly ones too, like “I Packed My Grandmother’s Trunk.” And on rainy days there were chess and checkers and parcheesi; the family had had to give up Monopoly (some kind friend had sent them a set), again because of Mr. Andrews, poor lamb, who was always reminded of his investments. When they had to make a joint decision, like where to send young Billy to college or what to have for Christmas dinner, they would solemnly do the “
sortes Virgilianae
” in full concourse assembled with Mr. Andrews’ old
Aeneid
; the idea was that the children became voting members of the family when they were able to construe Latin—think of that! Then the children got up treasure hunts, with homemade pincushions and calendars and a single amaryllis bulb for prizes, to take the place of paper chases, because they could not afford riding horses any more—only a few cows and chickens; one winter they had tried a pig. Polly used to hunt and ride sidesaddle, and she still had her riding habit and boots and bowler, which she took with her down to Princeton when Pokey remembered to ask her (Pokey had her own stables and hunted weekends); she had had to let out the coat, because she was a little fatter now than she was at eighteen, but they said she still looked very pretty, with her white skin and pale hair in the full-skirted black riding costume with a stock. Black was Polly’s color.